Exploring Singapore through its public data
Six interactive visualisations built on live feeds from LTA DataMall and data.gov.sg โ mapping the carparks, taxis, lamp posts, transit links, news cycle and the airspace above the island.
SINGAPORE โ A decade after data.gov.sg opened the firehose, the Republic now publishes thousands of live and historical datasets covering everything from carpark vacancies to incoming flight paths. Stitch enough of them together, and a portrait of the city begins to assemble in real time.
The six visualisations below are exploratory โ built directly on public feeds from the Land Transport Authority, the Urban Redevelopment Authority and the Department of Statistics. None of them require a permit, a press pass or a privileged login. Everything you see updates as the Republic moves.
Where the cars sit, in real time
HDB carparks publish their lot counts every minute. Map the live feed onto coordinates from the URA master plan, and the rush-hour heartbeat of the heartlands appears: full lots cluster around mature estates by 8pm, while car park barriers tick over in the CBD as offices empty.
Singapore HDB carparks, in real time
Live carpark availability across HDB estates. Hover any pin to see lots available and parking rates; toggle traffic cameras or the live traffic layer to overlay them.
Graphic The Straits Times · Source: data.gov.sg, URA Master Plan · Carparks refresh every 60s, cameras every 2 min · Last updated โ
Following the fleet
The taxi-availability API returns the live positions of thousands of vehicles on the road at any moment. Plotted over the island, the data reveals a moving silhouette of demand โ Orchard at lunchtime, Changi at the top of every hour, the heartlands after midnight.
Where every taxi is right now
Live taxi positions from LTA DataMall. Toggle the heat map to see where demand is clustering; overlay live traffic to see what they're driving into.
Graphic The Straits Times · Source: LTA DataMall · Refreshes every 30 seconds · Last updated โ
Open data is not a publication exercise. It is infrastructure. The interesting questions only emerge when the feeds are pointed at one another.A civic technologist working with data.gov.sg
An island lit by 100,000 lamps
The Land Transport Authority maintains an inventory of every street lamp on the island. Cluster them, and the road network draws itself: arterial roads as ribbons of light, the expressways as the brightest seams.
An island lit by 100,000 lamps
Every lamp post mapped from the LTA inventory. Pin colour reflects power level (dim, normal, bright); the glow approximates illumination radius.
Graphic The Straits Times · Source: LTA DataMall · Static dataset · Status โ
The connectivity backbone
The PULSE index combines bus stops, MRT stations and taxi pickups into a single connectivity score for each planning area. The result is a heat map of how easy it is to move through any part of the island โ a measure that does not always track the price of property.
PULSE โ a connectivity score for every planning area
MRT, bus, taxi and carpark density combined into a single 0โ100 connectivity score for each URA planning area. Click any polygon to see the full breakdown.
Graphic The Straits Times · Source: LTA DataMall, URA Master Plan, SingStat · Live transit feeds, daily-updated polygons · Status โ
What the country is reading
News headlines from Singaporean publications are parsed and grouped into clusters by topic. The resulting network shows how stories cross-pollinate between sections โ a piece about housing inevitably pulls in finance, transport and politics within a few hops.
How Singapore's news stories cluster
Hierarchical edge bundling of news articles. Stories that share a category, sentiment or keywords sit closer together. Hover a node for the article; click to isolate its direct neighbours.
Graphic The Straits Times · Source: Live news APIs · Updates daily at 6am SGT · Last loaded โ
Eyes on the sky
Every aircraft on approach to Changi or transiting Singapore's flight information region broadcasts an ADS-B signal. Aggregated and plotted, the data is a near-perfect record of one of the world's busiest pieces of airspace โ and a quiet reminder that the island is also a stop on a much larger map.
Eyes on Singapore airspace
Every flight in the Singapore Flight Information Region, plotted in real time from OpenSky ADS-B feeds. Hover a triangle for the callsign; click for the full flight card.
Graphic The Straits Times · Source: OpenSky Network, Changi Airport Group · Refreshes every 30 seconds · Last updated โ
A city that publishes itself
None of these visualisations exist in isolation. The lamp-post inventory feeds into the connectivity index; the carpark feed informs the taxi flow; the news graph picks up stories about the airspace. The point of an open-data ecosystem is not the individual feed โ it is the cumulative effect of having so many pointed at one another.