TDM TAKEAWAYTechnology about delays, productivity, and ease of use can greatly improve transit experiences.
Mobility Lab’s Transportation Techies has grown wildly to include more than 900 members in the Washington D.C. region since its founding a year-and-a-half ago – and the latest event featured its best show yet.
Here are a few of the projects presented at June’s Metro Hack Night III (look for more from this session to be featured here soon).
Train in Vain
Zach Rausnitz
Zach Rausnitz of the Washington City Paper had always heard complaints that D.C.’s Metro trains face constant delays, but he wanted to know: are delays actually happening non-stop?
Using the published daily reports of Metro alerts, he created a chart for the City Paper that plots out every delay that lasted 10 minutes or longer and color coded – from light to dark purple – to denote the severity of the delays. Perhaps confirming Metro’s unreliable reputation, there were only eight days between January 1 and June 18 of this year that did not have at least one delay of 10 minutes or longer. And quite a few deep purple days.
Keeping it updated remains a painstaking process, Rausnitz said. The delays are written up by WMATA in a word document. Each delay is explained in a brief paragraph but there is no standard language to make scraping the data easy. For example, one delay was reported as “service was shut until it closed” – definitely something to add for the chart, but difficult to do in any way other than manually.
Rausnitz said he is now looking at charting the total length of time the delays represented.
WTFMATA
Michael Nissenbaum
Besides creating a cathartic webpage name for frustrated Metro passengers, Michael Nissenbaum’s WTFMATA seeks to combine information on train arrivals, real-time Metro service alerts, and a Twitter widget that displays all tweets with the #wmata hashtag.
“I didn’t find a place where all this was in the same space,” Nissenbaum said. Just knowing when the next train is coming doesn’t help much if there is a major service issue up ahead on a rider’s route. And Twitter, while not exactly scientific, is where most people go first to complain when there’s an issue with the Metro. “Twitter is a great aggregator for people’s frustrations,” he said.
Read n Ride
Aurora Nou
Moving away from Metro frustrations, Aurora Nou created a way to make Metro commutes more enjoyable – and productive – by developing a program that delivers articles that have similar reading times to an individual rider’s travel time.
Read n Ride’s interface is very simple – riders input their start and stop stations, and then a variety of links to time-appropriate articles immediately appear from which to choose.
Nou said creating the API was the most challenging part, but it was made easier by the website Longreads, an aggregator that includes the estimated read time at the beginning of each article.
Your Personal Metro Arrival Board
John Hall
Transportation Techies tends to attract a lot of attention from people who are app developers and transportation data nerds. This time, we got some hardware.
Frustrated with not knowing if he needed to run to catch the next Metro in the morning and tired of fumbling with smartphone apps for arrival times, John Hall decided to make his own personal Metro arrival board.
The first-ever prototype is fairly simple in the data it displays. Hall programmed it to show arrival times for Orange line trains going towards Vienna, where he works, on the top display board and then arrival times for eastbound Orange and Silver line trains that head downtown, where he is most likely to meet up with friends.
For the first model, the device cost more than $150 to make, so it’s not exactly scalable for mass production just yet. But, for now, Hall has created for himself a smoother morning commute. If the response from the Techies group was any indication, he might prove to be very successful if he decides to launch his project on Kickstarter.
Understanding the Built Environment in Metro’s Walk Sheds
John Ricco
In 2014, The New Yorker created a feature in which readers could look at the median income of households surrounding a particular stop on the New York City subway. The result was a rather stunning map of New York’s income segregation.
Inspired by that metric, John Ricco created a similar visualization looking at the built environment by a Metro’s walk shed, or the area within a half-mile radius of Metro stations.
He tracked how many households lived in the walk shed and thus were more likely to be able to live a car-free lifestyle. For the Red Line, Shady Grove was the least effectively used, with only 460 households in the walk shed. Dupont Circle was the most effectively used, with 10,636 households within the walk shed.
Overall, Columbia Heights was the station with the most households in the walk shed for a total of 10,842. Two stations, Arlington Cemetery and Ronald Reagan National Airport, understandably had zero households in their walk sheds. In third place was Federal Triangle, with only four households in its walk shed.
That’s it for now. Don’t forget to join us at the next Transportation Techies event on July 27. This time, we’ll be meeting in Baltimore to focus on what our friends in Maryland have been up to.
See more photos by M.V. Jantzen