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Monday, December 17, 2012

Replaying real-time bus data, expanded

About a month ago I posted a demo playback of the real-time data from Oct 11, 2011 for the 57 bus, taken from the MBTA Data Contest sample. Now I've expanded it to include all key bus routes, the Silver Line and the CT routes.

Real-time bus data playback
I've added a bunch of options as well, because displaying all of this information on one map can get very CPU intensive. Disabling the Stop Request/Door Open markers will ease up most of the burden. You can also select which routes to display using the checkboxes on the right, as well as toggling whether to show the lines of the bus routes.

The data take awhile to load so it's been split up into pieces which are loaded in the background while the simulation begins. A progress bar will be displayed on top until it finishes loading, but the map will start showing the bus data that have been already downloaded.

It's easy to forget the scale of the system when you ride the same way every day. Just take a look, as it starts early in the morning with a lone 28 bus, and then explodes with activity as it reaches the morning peak, until the entire map is crawling with buses. And these are only the key routes.

(Tested in Chrome and Firefox; IE users may be out of luck).

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