Many of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s fundamental problems – like funding and infrastructure – appear to be sticking around.
But the agency’s open-data policy provides a lot of space for the public to at least better manage the passenger experience and plan for an improved system down the road.
Transit enthusiasts at the Transportation Techies’ seventh Metro Hack Night presented – in a show-and-tell format Wednesday night at Metro headquarters – how the public is able to leverage the Washington D.C. system’s open data.
Big-picture toolbox
WMATA’s data provides a digital toolbox that both passengers and planners can use to smooth out movement through the system and understand where it is the most tied up.
Tyler Green, of Intersection, dug into how we can understand a subway system in terms of the connections every station provides. Green presented the Metrorail system as a graph – not as a relation between variables and quantities, but a set of nodes and the connections they make with each other. This is the basis for routing software, but it can also serve planners by visualizing how an existing or proposed network could serve its customers, such as by highlighting important nodes, potential bottlenecks, and how connections change with the addition or subtraction of transfer points and routes.
Tyler Green of Intersection
There was also a more theoretical and aspirational version of Green’s tool in Shannon Turner’s Metro Map Maker. Using a grid of squares, users can start with the current Metrorail map and add or subtract to it as they like, displaying in a public format on the web their individual idea of what a perfect Metro – or plenty of other transit systems throughout the world – could look like if money were no obstacle.
Shannon Turner and her Metro Map Maker
MetroHero, a Techies regular, has been building a host of rider-friendly tools for the past two years. The team creates original real-time line maps and a dashboard that provides in-depth service information about stations and overall lines, including tweets about disruptions and the number of eight-car trains operating on each line. James Pizzurro, half of the MetroHero team, unveiled the bus-operations control center of their dashboard, which is useful for passengers. But he pointed out even WMATA managers could take advantage of the real-time performance data to monitor routes. In addition, MetroHero will soon provide all of the data it collects from WMATA to the public for free, with the hopes that more community members will build their own tools to help both planners and passengers (and present those tools and results at future Techies events).
Thinking of Metro itself as a piece of D.C.’s overall transportation puzzle, Ting Ma of the District Department of Transportation showed how Capital Bikeshare usage affects Metro ridership. Ultimately, the environment around particular stations, such as density and bike networks, determine whether or not Capital Bikeshare steals or provides passengers to Metro. In short, the bike system results in fewer people riding Metro in the downtown core stations (by making a straight bike ride more convenient) but boosts ridership from peripheral stations (by making them more accessible to their surrounding areas). The next intriguing stage in this discussion will be to see how the District’s new dockless-bikeshare offerings affect this balance.
Getting physical
Kevin Combes, a WMATA employee, has been concentrating on overcrowding at the Gallery Place-Chinatown stop in downtown D.C. As a major thoroughfare for both commuters and tourists, with more than 100,000 transfers every day, six-car trains become a bigger problem for passengers at this stop than elsewhere in the system. Many passengers waiting toward the back of a train’s platform do not realize the train pulling into the station won’t stop in front of them, and end up having to hurry down the platform to crowd into the last car. This, mixed with the passengers attempting to exit the overflowing tail, is what Combes refers to as “the knot.” Despite Metro adding decals to platforms to indicate the back end of six-car trains, people who don’t know about these markings won’t look for them, and therefore remain in the spaces that the seventh and eighth cars would occupy on the full-size trains. Combes has designed a simple solution in the hopes of untying the knot: an automated announcement that plays once per minute in the seventh and eighth car area when the next train arriving only has six cars. The announcement urges passengers to move forward, and explicitly tells them not to wait for the train where they are. Some behavior-change is a straightforward matter.
Kevin Combes of WMATA
As Combes’ work shows, the passenger experience extends far beyond actually being on the train – it includes being in and around the station itself. Lee Mendelowitz’ DC Metro Metrics follows elevator and escalator outages, including historical animations so users can watch how those people-moving machines have performed throughout the Metro system over time. The data even breaks down types of outages, such as breakdowns or repairs, providing yet another tool for managers and the public to track performance.
There is also plenty of behind-the-scenes work to improve communication and movement within Metro stations. Carol Politi and TRX System’s Personnel Tracker are following how people move through the many spots indoors at Metro stations where GPS doesn’t work. She hopes this work will lead to improved safety and efficiency for customers and operators.
Two presenters, Eric Haengel and Ed O’Brien, brought in real-time LED train trackers based on WMATA’s train API. O’Brien’s hardware is a strip that represents the Green Line, with each light representing the circuits along the tracks, following them through the tunnels. Haengel made a glass laser-cut rendering of the official Metro map, with colored bulbs to correspond to each line, lighting up at whichever station the trains enter. Now neither has to even pull out a phone to figure out when they need to leave and catch the train.
Eric Haengel
View the tweets here.
Photos by M.V. Jantzen.