About one in nine Glaswegians lives within a 10-minute walk of the Subway

The loop has 15 stations, but covers only a small part of the city.

How many Glaswegians live within a 10-minute walk of the Subway?

By Moxi · 7 November · Posted

Enlarge

B · Subway shown. Select the map to enlarge.

Credits: OpenStreetMap contributors; National Records of Scotland, ONS, Ordnance Survey. Full sources

11%

of residents, about one in nine, are within a modelled 10-minute walk of a Subway station; 10% to 12% at 4 to 5 km/h

8.1%

of Glasgow City, 14.2 km² of 175 km², is mapped as Public Park Or Garden

63 seconds

from first command to first render of map A, with data and style prepared beforehand

The thinking

What changed and why

The prompt was 10 minutes, so I timed the drawing. Map A took 63 seconds from first command to first render, plus under a minute fixing three small faults. The data and analysis were prepared beforehand, with the drawing style ready to reuse.

Map A looked too much like the day before it, so I made a second map that clearly differs: transport instead of green space, lines instead of polygons, a dark ground for the underground and one warm colour.

An earlier version of map B gave little sense of Glasgow itself. I cut the text by about a third and added the stations people know, an inset of the whole city and the size of the place. Map A is kept here beside it.

Two maps, one prompt

Side by side

Map of Glasgow City council area headed "About 8% of Glasgow is mapped as public park or garden". OS-recorded public parks and gardens are dark green; other recorded greenspace is pale grey-green. Water, including the Clyde between the two parts of the council area, is pale blue-grey. Small patches are scattered across the city, with larger parks in the south and east. Leader lines label Pollok Country Park in the south-west (139 ha, the largest park wholly inside the city) and Cathkin Braes in the south (152 ha inside Glasgow, 89% of the park). The subtitle gives 14.2 km² out of 175 km², or 8.1%; all recorded types cover 14.3%. A legend is below the headline, a 5 km scale bar at top right, and ONS and OS credits at the bottom. — A · parks

Dark street map of Glasgow: about one in nine residents, 11%, live within a modelled 10-minute walk of a Subway station; 10% to 12% at walking speeds of 4 to 5 km/h. Reachable streets glow pale gold to orange along the white Subway loop; other streets are dim. The River Clyde, Kelvingrove Park, Buchanan Street, St Enoch, Glasgow Central and Queen Street station provide context. Solid rings mark Kelvinhall, Kelvinbridge and St George's Cross, which reach the most people; dashed rings mark Shields Road, West Street and Bridge Street, which reach the fewest. A Glasgow City boundary inset locates the loop and main map. A 2 km scale and context lines give the city as 175 square kilometres and 620,870 people, the census-area total, and the loop as about 10.5 km. Street distances start at census-area population centres, not individual homes. — B · Subway

These are two different maps of the same city, not two versions of one layout.

Method

How it was made

Map A measures the area OS Open Greenspace records as Public Park Or Garden inside the Glasgow City council boundary: 14.2 km² of 175 km². All recorded greenspace types together cover 14.3%. Map B models walking along the OpenStreetMap street network from census-area population centres to the 15 Subway stations, 800 m at 4.8 km/h. On that measure 71,172 of 620,870 residents are within reach, 11%; the range across walking speeds of 4 to 5 km/h is 10% to 12%.

Limits

What this cannot tell you

OS describes these green spaces as likely to be accessible to the public. 'Mapped as' matters: this is what OS has recorded, not a measure of access or of all green land. Map B is modelled walking from census-area population centres, not actual journeys. Hills, crossings and time to the platform are not included, and catchments overlap, so station counts do not add up.

What I’d do next

I would check whether OS's Public Park Or Garden matches what residents would call a park, and test the Subway map on a real phone in daylight.

Read my learning log

Data and credits

Sources

Data were filtered, dissolved, joined and re-symbolised by me.

Glasgow City boundary · both maps: Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0 Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2025.Open Government Licence v3.0
Population · Scotland's Census 2022 output areas · map B: Copyright National Records of Scotland; Contains NRS data © Crown copyright and database right 2024; Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2024Open Government Licence v3.0

The 2024 year in the National Records of Scotland credit is inferred from the data product and still needs confirming.

My map design and text: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Source data retain the licences above. Every source across the series is on the credits page.