Show HN: Visualizing transit delays in real time for SF MUNI

http://bdon.org/2013/08/28/visualizing-transit-delays/

by bdon • 13 years ago

58 11 13 years ago

bdon.org

Groxx3• 13 years ago

Neat - I'll have to read on how you did this, I'd love to incorporate it in a transit site/app somehow :)

There are some oddities, though - what does this mean? http://cl.ly/image/2p0b2c1H2l1X

bdon3• 13 years ago

The direction (inbound/outbound) comes from NextBus data and is frequently erroneous, so in that case a train traveling outbound is shown with the inbound vehicles.

The position above the last stop is because MUNI vehicles have significant extra track beyond the 4th/King stop that they use to wait and turn around.

Groxx3• 13 years ago

Oh, of course - I forgot I didn't click the outbound box. After seeing that it's pretty clear :)

toki5• 13 years ago

Oh my gosh that logo is unbelievably distracting! Especially when opening a page that "does ____ in real time" -- I spent way longer than I should have thinking "what is this logo doing and what does it have to do with the rest of the page ..."

Once I got over that, very cool site :)

bdon3• 13 years ago

Haha, point taken. I should really disable that on all sub-pages...

Groxx3• 13 years ago

I couldn't figure out what you were talking about until I tried the site in Chrome xD

fwiw it's just a solid gray in the latest Firefox nightly. No idea if that's by design / site bug / FF bug.

stereo• 13 years ago

Have you tried using different colours to make it easier to distinguish inbound and outbound, like this? http://www.opentrack.ch/opentrack/downloads/otTrainGraph.pdf

I suppose you could even set the colour dynamically along the track, and set the hue based on how late the train is.

annymsMthd• 13 years ago

It looks alot like something I did for my last job. Comparing schedules to actual transit bus performance. It's really neat stuff when you start digging into distance/time. http://imgur.com/gmN3EfS

drewblaisdell• 13 years ago

Very nice.

This uses the same type of visualization as the train schedule in Edward Tufte's Envisioning Information: http://www.c82.net/images/java-railroad-lg.jpg

bdon3• 13 years ago

I haven't seen that one before, neat! The one featured in the first Tufte book is E.J. Marey's schedule: http://mbostock.github.io/protovis/ex/marey-train-schedule.j... (as linked from http://mbostock.github.io/protovis/ex/caltrain.html)

gojomo• 13 years ago

Very cool! I live a couple blocks from the N, take it downtown all the time.

Random look/interface ideas to consider if you continue to tweak, no particular order:

• different colors for inbound/outbound

• different colors or line thicknesses for when the slope is/is-not on 'ideal' schedule

• suppress interior (scroll-wheel) scroll-event capturing: slow and unintuitive on its scaling/shifting effect

• always show +/- 3 stops slopes extending from current vehicle positions ('prediction'/vs-ideal)

• allow selection of stop; decorate arriving vehicles with estimated arrival times (either as numbers or line-extrapolations)

• suppress refresh countdown - distracting, uncancellable, so doesn't add much

• when selecting (or even hovering) over one path/vehicle/stop, and thus showing more info for it, dim all others

Show HN: Visualizing transit delays in real time for SF MUNI

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