6 ms·
Beyond the route: Introducing granular MTA bus speed data
- vavooom 2y agoWe are excited for Open Data users to dig into this dataset, experiment, and find insights from the “speed sample of NYC’s streets” that the MTA’s 4,900 buses collect each day. This data will be uploaded on a monthly basis, and can be found on the NYS Open Data portal. What a great dataset and effort to allow for further research into areas of the city that could benefit from anti-congestion measures (cough cough car tax) to improve bus services! Also - where does one even store 4,900 buses in NYC? I guess most of the fleet is out on the streets all day, but I imagine servicing all of those is quite the feat.
- socki 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_depots_of_MTA_Regional_Bus_Operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_depots_of_MTA_Regional_Bus...
- jhgaylor 2y agoI was sure it would be off the island somewhere so I looked it up. There are many depots around the boroughs and they seem to handle their servicing internally there. There is one not far off of Times Square.
- MarCylinder 2y agoExactly this. Lots of bus depots all around NYC. Several across Staten Island alone. My uncle worked at the MTA for his entire career as a bus mechanic. My favorite story was when a rep from a company selling "green" buses was visiting. Rep said "These buses never break! You guys might be out of work." and then asked "So when do the buses stop running for the day?" He was less confident in the reliability of his product when he learned the buses in NYC don't stop.
- mmmlinux 2y agoSo this is something I had vaguely always wondered about NYC. Is there actually enough space to park all the personal cars, Or is it assumed that some percentage are always on the road. I didn't hear about serious parking congestion during covid so I now assume that yes, there do seem to be enough car spots.
- chipgap98 2y agoParking isn’t too much of a hassle in the outer burrows compared to Manhattan. Also lots of cars get driven in from outside the city, so presumably there were fewer of those during Covid.
- squeaky-clean 2y agoYeah I think commuters are the biggest reason. It's fairly easy to find parking in Manhattan after 9pm. At noon though? Good luck.
- NovemberWhiskey 2y agoThere is plenty of parking space for the cars that you see on the streets of New York. It's just mostly in the outer boroughs, on Long Island, or in New Jersey.
- woodruffw 2y agoWhat is "all" the cars? Less than half of NYC households own a car[1]; if 100% of households did (or owned more than one, as is common outside of NYC), the city would have nowhere near enough space for them. (The city already has virtually no space for the 2 million cars that are owned by the city's residents, plus the millions that enter the city daily. We have laws on the books that are intended to reduce the number of unnecessary car trips in the city, but our feckless state leadership has decided that it doesn't need to follow already-passed laws.) [1]: https://www.hunterurban.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Car-Light-NYC-Infographics-May-2024.pdf https://www.hunterurban.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Car-L...
- willmeyers 2y agoNYC has one of the best open data portals out there. Kudos to all the teams and agencies who manage it.
- mastercheif 2y agoShoutout to Philippe Vibien for creating “NYC Subway Stringlines”, one of my favorite (and certainly most used) data visualizations ever. Made possible by the MTA’s GTFS RT feed. https://pvibien.com/stringline.htm https://pvibien.com/stringline.htm Note: If you’re checking this out around 6 PM EST, look at the E train to get an idea of what a bad night on the subway looks like. Each line on the graph represents a train with the Y axis as stations and the X axis representing time. You can follow the trip of the train and get an idea for how well the line is running based on the straightness of the line. If you see areas where the line is flat in the Y axis, you know that a train is being held at a station. Here’s an example where “stringlines” provide information that a countdown clock couldn’t convey: https://i.imgur.com/u5VGqH4.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/u5VGqH4.jpeg Because the “line” is not progressing past 5th Ave/53rd st, we know that that is where the issue is occurring. A countdown timer would simply either say static or start adding time, but you wouldn’t know how far the next train is from you. Here’s another example: https://i.imgur.com/mrvrbUt.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/mrvrbUt.jpeg What I can glean from this is that the E train is running with much lower frequency than it was an hour ago, so I should expect longer wait times. It’s truly a marvelous invention.
- trainyperson 2y agoI also love this visualization and remember being blown away when I first saw it! Two notes: 1. These “stringlines” are also known as Time-Space Diagrams in the transit industry, and they’ve been around for a while. e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Time-space-diagrams-of-train-timetables-for-a-one-line-metro-a-Regular-and-b_fig1_294138079 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Time-space-diagrams-of-t... In fact Vibien cites as inspiration the official NYCT stringline paper: https://www.worldtransitresearch.info/research/5936/ https://www.worldtransitresearch.info/research/5936/ 2. I’ve noticed that at least on the A, the viz is inaccurate? It’s missing a lot of trains.
- SushiHippie 2y agoThe embedded video does not work for me on Android (neither chrome or firefox, I think it is because it adds an iframe with a /embed/ link with autoplay via javascript after the "Watch this video" button has been pressed) This is the youtube link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MsHGqVuIK5g https://youtube.com/watch?v=MsHGqVuIK5g
- pininja 2y agoIn case anyone wants to do a similar visualization on their own, this looks like a screen capture of kepler.gl which is an open source web tool for this kind of map data exploration.
- woodruffw 2y agoA fun fact about NYC's buses: many of the routes are turn-by-turn replicas of previous streetcar routes; Brooklyn alone had dozens[1]. The B46[2], for example, follows the Utica-Reid line as it ran until 1951. They never actually tore up most of these lines; the city just paved over them. You can see them poking through the pavement whenever the city redoes the roads. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_streetcar_lines_in_Brooklyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_streetcar_lines_in_Bro... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B46_(New_York_City_bus) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B46_(New_York_City_bus)
- Contusion3532 2y agoIgnoring the huge issue of political will, how much more or less effective would street cars be on these lines, compared to buses?
- woodruffw 2y agoI think it would depend: one of the reasons the streetcars were originally eliminated is that they were increasingly held up in traffic, and the argument was that buses could navigate (like cars) around traffic, make detours, etc. In practice however that hasn't really been borne out: the city's buses are notoriously slow. The city has (correctly) reprioritized bus lanes (including lane enforcement for scofflaw drivers) and express services (SBS) in response, but at that point we're essentially back to rights-of-way (i.e. how much of Europe runs timely and efficient streetcar networks). In short: I think streetcars would be less effective if not (partially) separated, but more effective otherwise. Given that the city is moving towards bus lane separation anyways, I personally believe they should revitalize the streetcar network instead. But that's (1) expensive, and (2) involves impressive amounts of local political spaghetti, given that the buses are currently run by state-level MTA while the roads are owned by the city.
- thescriptkiddie 2y agoYa the idea that buses are better than streetcars because they can go around traffic is just completely detached from reality. Maybe a bus can go around one double-parked car but during rush hour that's not happening. It was always just an excuse to avoid taking an inch of space away from cars for dedicated transit right of way.
- mrtimo 2y agoJust downloaded all the data as a 2.45GB csv file. It took about 10 minutes to "export", before the download started.
- mbo 2y agoSeems like a Parquet or SQLite file would have been more appropriate
- voytec 2y agoFrom the context (buses mentioned) I'm assuming this about the Metropolitan Transportation Authority? I had to search for how the "MTA" abbreviation can be expanded. My mind resolves "MTA" to "Mail Transport Agent".
- doctorpangloss 2y agoDo you need the data to know that busses are insanely slow?
- AStonesThrow 2y agoNever underestimate the bandwidth of a double-articulated bus filled with people going to work/play/shop. Also, slow = safe. Around here, the operators are cautious, diligent, and the best drivers on the road.
- selectodude 2y agoMTA bus drivers are maniacs. I mean, I appreciate that they are but cautious or diligent aren’t the adjectives I’d use.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago> Never underestimate the bandwidth of a double-articulated bus filled with people going to work/play/shop. Let's imagine a chart, "Average door to door journey time experienced by a passenger" and "Total journey time" as a function of "Number of people on the bus." Do you think these lines go up and to the right, or down and to the right? If it goes down and to the right, do you think the slope is steep enough so that the total door to door journey time goes down? Who is the marginal bus passenger? Is it people who are in a hurry, or who can take their time to get to a destination? What does that say about average door to door journey time? I don't get it. It seems like common sense to me that busses are slow. As they get used more, they get slower, not faster. There is so much adverse selection for a bus passenger: the very first passenger is for whom it is most convenient, and the very last passenger likely has the worst journeys. In your scenario, you asked to estimate. The expected average passenger and aggregate journey times of a double articulated bus filled with people is much slower than an empty bus. That said, anyone is entitled to strongly held beliefs about anything. The only intervention that lowers average and total door to door journey times makes busses look more like Ubers than trains.
- abecedarius 2y ago
- o10449366 2y agomaybe someone will finally highlight how ridiculous the gridlock is on the b44-sbs route, particularly through south williamsburg. I regularly see convoys of 4-5 buses arriving at the same time because the traffic through that neighborhood is so bad that the buses eventually catch up to each other and I regularly have to wait 30+ minutes for it on either end of the route.
- dml2135 2y agoMTA seems to be seriously upping their technology game over the past few years. Anecdotally, I've noticed their apps seem to have better UX and are more reliable. I'd be curious to learn what organization changes have happened to enable this.
- testfrequency 2y agoBay Area transplants, like the gays, are a great addition to any community
- BOOSTERHIDROGEN 2y agoI'm curious too.