MBTA Service Frequency

December 12th, 2009
mbta, programming, tech, transport
The MBTA publishes a transit feed primarily it can appear in google transit. The feed is publicly available, however, which means I can play with it. There is a lot of data, enough that I can't get GoogleTransitDataFeed to load it all to memory. I want to look more at gtdf and possibly use it in the future, but for now I'm just happy to read the csv files in the feed. I'm still thinking about how to display the data in interesting ways, but an easy first one is to show service frequency at each stop:
There is a really large svg (which I made with svgfig (I only used a tiny fraction of svgfig's capabilities, it's really powerful, especially for plotting graphs)) linked behind the png. It might be big enough to crash your browser.

The grey lines are the shapes the mbta publishes in shapes.txt. They appear to be the commuter rail and rapid transit lines, including the silver line. The yellow dots are all the stops in stops.txt with an area proportional to the number of times they're listed in stop_times.txt, which I think corresponds to their service frequency. For single pixel stops this does not hold because all stops visited at least once get at least one pixel. I've cropped the image to leave out the ten most distant stops in each direction. The map is projected by calling the gps coordinates screen coordinates (after translation and scaling) which probably introduces some distortion. I merged stops that were really close.

Referenced in: Markov Me

Comment via: facebook

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commo…

via Posts on October 28, 2024

Weird People of History: Jenny from the Jane Abortion Collective

Direct action when abortion was illegal

via Thing of Things October 24, 2024

Inner dialogue, walking down the sidewalk

A discussion I have with myself a lot The post Inner dialogue, walking down the sidewalk appeared first on Otherwise.

via Otherwise October 10, 2024

more     (via openring)