"transit data" entries
Visualization of the Week: Commuting Paris
Dataveyes' new interactive map visualizes the Paris metro system from a time and crowd perspective.
The team at Dataveyes has launched its latest project, Metropolitain.io, an interactive map visualizing the Paris metro system. Using data provided by Autonomous Operator of Parisian Transports (RATP) and from Isokron, the team visualized the metro system from both a crowd and time perspective.
Visualization of the Week: A day in the life of a bus line
Urban Data Challenge winners Adam Greenhall, Amelia Greenhall, and Jared McFarland visualized bus route activity for Zurich, San Francisco, and Geneva.
The Urban Data Challenge winners have been announced. The grand prize was awarded to the team behind the Dots on the Bus animated, interactive visualization — Adam Greenhall, Amelia Greenhall, and Jared McFarland.
The team culled public transportation data provided for the contest by Zurich, San Francisco, and Geneva from the week of October 1-7, 2012. According to the about pop-up on the visualization site, the data included “each bus, the time it arrived at each stop, and how many people got on and off (as counted by lasers), along with the lat/long of each stop and route.”
With new maps and apps, the case for open transit gets stronger
OpenPlans looks to improve transportation infrastructure with open data and open source code.
Earlier this year, the news broke that Apple would be dropping default support for transit in iOS 6. For people (like me) who use the iPhone to check transit routes and times when they travel, that would mean losing a key feature. It also has the potential to decrease the demand for open transit data from cities, which has open government advocates like Clay Johnson concerned about public transportation and iOS 6.
This summer, New York City-based non-profit Open Plans launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new iPhone transit app to fill in the gap.
“From the public perspective, this campaign is about putting an important feature back on the iPhone,” wrote Kevin Webb, a principal at Open Plans, via email. “But for those of us in the open government community, this is about demonstrating why open data matters. There’s no reason why important civic infrastructure should get bound up in a fight between Apple and Google. And in communities with public GTFS, it won’t.”
Open Plans already had a head start in creating a patch for the problem: they’ve been working with transit agencies over the past few years to build OpenTripPlanner, an open source application that uses open transit data to help citizens make transit decisions.