THE ART OF CARTOGRAPHY

Can cartography help a High Street?

Our mapping services can prove beneficial to High Streets in many ways. Our bespoke services create clear, attractive mapping which highlights key places of interest, shops and landmarks, and can be used as the ultimate promotional tool.

Maps provide a dual role for a vibrant town centre – primarily as a street display board where the map will provide useful location information to a visitor to the town, but also, and perhaps more importantly, a well-crafted promotional map can visually display your own diverse and distinctive environment.

Clear, attractive mapping that demonstrates not only the retail environment but also the evening and night economies can help to encourage income from tourism, visitors and leisure.

In addition to use by visitors, a digital map can be used to view multiple layers of information in a simple but effective way. Entering specific data, like footfall, over a measured period of time, can easily be displayed on a map allowing businesses, BIDs and town centres to analyse and improve income locally. Although such information may be hard to decipher on a chart or spreadsheet, a map can easily communicate the information for the end user.

Think what a high street could do with a quick and simple tool that could pinpoint an area that requires improvement and focus its marketing efforts. Or even use the map to help to rent vacant property in an area that is proven to have increased its footfall volumes.

 

How do we do it?

 

Maps need updating, and the way we set up our digital files allows this to be done easily. It’s a very different way of working to a designer/illustrator. Files are multi-layered with sophisticated linkages and styling so that a new road, business, place of interest, event or dealership can be added swiftly and plotted accurately. This is more cost effective than having to completely re-draw a map because a new business has set up in the high street or a new road has been added.

Oxford Cartographers design and adapt maps to provide the size, styling and colours you need, and supply the maps in a range of formats.

Introducing Connect Point

Along with our sister company FWT, our online interactive travel planning solutions have leapt forward in their ability to use scheduled and real-time passenger transport data that councils hold to plan a journey at bus stop-specific level. We can also incorporate a UK-wide journey planner, show zonal overlays for demand responsive transport in rural areas, incorporate data that shows cycling and walking routes and their popularity.

Our new range of interactive touch-screen information kiosks and e-paper bus stop information displays, both of which will be on the ground in live environments in the UK and US by the end of the year. The displays have been designed to be relevant to anyone in a bus/rail station environment, or any location reliant on good public transport access.

The default home screen shows a rolling list of next departures, able to absorb real-time feeds and including nearby boarding points, which is of obvious use to almost everyone passing by. But on interrogating each departure, you instantly have access to routing information and scheduled journey times, as well as being able to access the journey planning function to reach a destination by any mode.

The best way to describe our e-paper units are to envisage a Kindle. The dimensions of the screen are likely to be those of an individual Kindle, or two or three stacked vertically within a bespoke bus stop case.

The obvious advantages are the ability to remotely update both planned and unforeseen changes to times and routes whilst saving on the costs of printing and laminating static posters and the time taken to physically update them. This has the added advantage of ensuring new information is posted on the day of a change, rather than a week before or later.

Its not all about bus timetables too! Journey planning for local tourist attractions, cycle routes, etc can all be displayed. With the additional advertising space at the bottom, create an additional income by selling advert space.