Following on from admins post about frequent network mapping yesterday a video has appeared online showing Aucklands public transport network throughout the day. It is actually something I have wanted to see for a long time.
A couple of things I noted from it are:
- It strikes me just how complex our PT network seems, there are lines going all over the place.
- Just how many PT vehicles are on the move at any one time.
- That you can really see is some of the spaghetti like routes that we have and you can see actually see some buses winding their way through residential roads at odd times of the day.
- The speed difference between buses on the busway compared to some of them on the isthmus i.e. you see a bus start out west at about 5am and wind its way through the streets but once it hits about Pt Chev it only crawls along.
- That some areas have big gaps in their levels service.
The video is absolutely amazing and I am please to see in the comments that Auckland Transport have picked up on it, I hope they can use something like this and build on it as it would be great to have it updated as things improve.
This is a great piece of work and a perfect example of what happens when things like transit data is more open, great work Chris
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That is really awesome. I’ve seen similar maps for London’s underground network and also for international flights. Great to see something specific to Auckland.
Geez don’t those Northern Express services just shoot up the busway.
Awesome video, if I could get ONE thing changed though, I would get different types of PT seperated by colour – bus; green, train; blue, ferry; red, etc. Not a huge difference, but I think it’d certainly change the way you view this completely….
Good idea James, although it might be better to group the NEX services in with the trains and call those ‘rapid transit’.
Another option would be to colour or shade them according to how frequent they are. For example routes that run every fifteen minutes glow bright, while those that run once an hour are dull. Then we could visualise where the ‘system’ actually is, rather than just where the routes are.
Another thing might be to vary the size of the tadpoles according to the capacity of the vehicle. For example buses and the mini ferries might stay that size, while trains and the large ferries were say three times as large. This would help visualise the amount of capacity and people moved.
My idea is that you can zoom in and out, pan, view in different levels. If you wanted, you could type in your bus stop number and see the buses zoom past. Eventually the real time system will be viewable like this too, you can click you bus stop and see where the next services are physically running at.
Thank you for the comments. There are some good ideas here. I plan to work on a tided up version and I will release it over the coming weeks. I will certainly keep these ideas in mind. I actually wrote some code to handle multiple colours. Now it’s a matter of figuring out a good colour scheme to keep the visualisation nicely balanced.
Chris
Thanks for stopping by Chris, let us know if you publish a new version as I’m sure plenty of people are keen to see it, keep up the good work.