London’s bikeshare has launched over 5 million trips since it started in 2010. This animation by visualization specialist Jo Wood shows you where they’ve all been going. It’s more informative if you know the city — but even if you don’t, it’s kind of hypnotic.

Reader support makes our work possible. Donate today to keep our site free. All donations TRIPLED!

(It won’t let us embed, but New Scientist has a version with trippy music — highly recommended.)

The animation doesn’t track the actual movement of the bikes (that’s why the lines don’t match up with a London road map). Instead, Wood looked at the start and end points of the bikeshare’s first 5 million customers — so what emerges from the map’s initial chaos is a plot of the most popular start and end points and how they feed into each other. This is useful for letting planners know which stations to stock with bikes … but for people outside the small world of London bike transport, it mainly just looks really cool.