Movement & Time

Tracks are not points — the order and the clock are the data.

A GPS track looks like a table of points until you try to measure anything: the speed between two fixes depends on the sampling rate, the total distance depends on how much noise you left in, and a timezone-naive column sorts a night shift into the wrong day. These guides cover what makes a trajectory different from a point layer, where GPS error comes from and what it does to derived quantities, cleaning and resampling a track, splitting it into trips and stops, map-matching it to a street network, and aggregating many tracks into flows.

14 Steps in this path

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14 guides: the concepts underneath the work, then each task, then the errors that task produces. Work down, or jump to the step you need.

  1. Sampling Rate and Gaps Explained: How Often Is Often Enough gps sampling rate explained 🧭 Concept
  2. GPS Error Explained: Why Your Track Wanders gps error explained 🧭 Concept
  3. How to Load GPS Tracks into Python as Trajectories load gps tracks python ⚙️ How-To
  4. My Time Column Sorts or Joins Wrongly spatial time column timezone errors 🔧 Fix
  5. How to Clean a GPS Track: Outliers, Duplicates and Jumps clean gps track python ⚙️ How-To
  6. My Track Has Impossible Speeds or Teleports track impossible speeds 🔧 Fix
  7. How to Calculate Speed, Distance and Direction Along a Track speed distance direction track python ⚙️ How-To
  8. Stops, Trips and Segmentation Explained stops trips segmentation explained 🧭 Concept
  9. How to Split a Track into Trips and Stops in Python split track into trips python ⚙️ How-To
  10. How to Resample and Interpolate a Track to a Fixed Interval resample gps track python ⚙️ How-To
  11. How to Map-Match a GPS Track to a Street Network map match gps track python ⚙️ How-To
  12. How to Aggregate Movement into Flows Between Zones aggregate movement flows python ⚙️ How-To
  13. How to Animate Movement Over Time in Python animate movement python ⚙️ How-To

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