1. SFMTA Municipal Transportation Agency Image: Historic Car number 1 and 162 on Embarcadero
Urban Data Challenge
Visualizing Transportation Data
02 | 06 | 2013
Swissnex

2. Outline
• System Overview and Challenges
• The Datasets
• Open Government Data
• What Insights Are We Looking For?
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3. Muni Overview
• SFMTA operates over
3 million service hours
annually
• 5 distinct transit modes
(bus, trolley, cable car,
light rail, historic streetcar)
• 710,000 daily boardings
225 million annually
• 4th highest usage in the
nation (passengers per capita)
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4. Street Level Challenges

5. Transit First City
• Safe and efficient movement of
people and goods
• Promote public transit, bicycle and
pedestrian travel as attractive
alternatives
• Encourage innovative solutions to
meet public transportation needs

6. Striving for Reliability
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7. TEP Signal Priority Central Subway
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8. Do these policies and projects work?
• Reliable and faster transit service
• Reliable: On-time and/or expected headways
• Reliable: Consistent travel time
• Faster: Less time to travel
• Faster: More frequent service at same cost
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9. Let’s look at the data for answers
Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL)
Data
• Time stamp and Lat/long
every 90 sec or 200 m.
• Scheduled and actual data.
• 100 percent coverage.
Automatic Passenger Counter
(APC) Data
• Passenger on/off data.
• “Dwell time” and traffic delay
at stops.
• Scheduled and actual data.
• Covers 30 percent of bus
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10. Travel Time Reliability
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12. Terminal Departures Performance
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13. Geographically Targeted Supervision

14. Terminal Departures by Time of Day
Large number of
late departures
Early departures
after 10 p.m.
General unreliability
during Owl hours

15. Ridership
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17. Damn it Jim! I’m
a transit
engineer, not a
data scientist!

19. Desired Insights and Visualizations
• Service
– What does the transit map look like by time
of day?
– What does ridership look like by time of
day?
– Where are people coming from and going
to?
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20. Desired Insights and Visualizations
• Interaction with traffic
– Reliability, speed,
delays
– Heartbeat of the City:
How does the blood
flow by time of day,
day of week?
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21. Desired Insights and Visualizations
• Transit Project Benefits
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22. Be Creative!
But also help answer the key policy and
operational questions
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ 22
2010/04/02/nyregion/taxi-map.html?

23. Go Forth and Visualize!
Chris Pangilinan @cap_transport
Felipe Robles @fliprobles
San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency