How many Chinatown (NYC) buses are there?

[Chuck Lin]

There are 3856 records of routes I've gathered. Looking for a good way to represent this data. here is something I put together today. Any suggestion is greatly appreciated!

https://public.tableausoftware.com/views/TimeandLocation/GeoRoutes?:embed=n&:display_count=no&:showVizHome=no

[Frank Hebbert]

Torque from CartoDB has some nice time series mapping, included in the standard carto styling options -- http://cartodb.github.io/torque/

How did you collect the data? 

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 11:58 PM, Chuck Lin <chuck...@gmail.com> wrote:

There are 3856 records of routes I've gathered. Looking for a good way to represent this data. here is something I put together today. Any suggestion is greatly appreciated!

https://public.tableausoftware.com/views/TimeandLocation/GeoRoutes?:embed=n&:display_count=no&:showVizHome=no

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Frank Hebbert
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[Chuck Lin]

Hey Frank! Fancy meeting you here!

Thanks, I'll check out CartoDB. 

Working with SPaCE, a neighborhood association in Chinatown. We're trying to get DOT to notice that the concentration of buses in our little neighborhood is quite shocking. We have nearly 100 bus companies operating out of less than 10 square blocks. Its feeling like I live in a bus depot.

We're still collecting data although we're probably 70-80% done with data collection so I'm looking at doing some analysis. I can send you the raw data after I'm done collecting if you are interested in such things. Your office is in this neighborhood and you must notice the dramatic increase in Chinatown buses.

[Noel Hidalgo]

if you are looking for a quick tool to "sketch" out the routes, you might want to explore http://www.transitmix.net

n

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[Frank Hebbert]

On the non-technical side, some ideas --

• Planning Corps (planningcorps.org) might be interested in helping with analysis/policy. I will connect you off list.
  
• ChekPeds and Community Board have done a lot of work around buses, because they get traffic from the Port Authority, plus lots of curbside pickup.http://chekpeds.com/tag/buses
  
• WNYC and RPA have looked at bus issues before.
  
• As has Streetsblog -- http://www.streetsblog.org/category/neighborhoods/chinatown/

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[Chris Whong]

I think the way you're displaying the data on the map can be misleading, as it implies that in a given hour, a certain number of routes will be departing from that location.  In reality, a given route doesn't run every single day, right?  

Torque is probably not a good fit for this data as it's not really time series data, and an animation will have the same issue I described above.

If you have data on specific trips over a specific time period, that would be a much better fit for animating, and a heatmap might be a good option to show just how many curbside pickups are happening over time and where. (and Torque will work fine for this too)

I'd also recommend sharing the data publicly on github so others can find and download it.  

-Chris

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[Chuck Lin]

The data has route information for each day of the week. You can uncheck any particular day of the week. It is not assumed that a given route runs every day. The problem with the data is that the route is taken from the bus company's schedule, so a single bus might make several stops in the same state, which is misleading as it increases the number of routes from a departure location. We are working on cleaning up the data to reflect this problem.

We're still in the middle of compiling this data. The reason we are doing this is that DOT only has records for the 20 bus companies that have permits while the 70 other non-permitted companies operate on the streets without any oversight. Any information that stem from DOT or community board (CB3) are only the permitted buses, which does not give a reasonable picture of the situation.

Much of this data gathering is laborious and done by volunteers from our neighborhood association. we have only gathered information on the 30 biggest companies and have a few dozen more destinations to enter into the system. This also doesn't include casino buses, nor dollar vans.

I don't see any issue in making this data public once we gather sufficient amount of data and to find a good way to represent a single route with multiple destinations. I'm working on some code to gather this. I will also scrub the company names from the data before publishing it.

Currently we have 3800 routes per week, picking up at 31 locations in New York and reaching 188 destinations in 16 states. We have many more bus companies to go.

Thanks to everyone for your suggestions. 


-chuck