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Friday, April 4, 2014

More fun with maps: walksheds and transit lines

As a follow-up to my first look at the contest data, I have mapped the "transit walkshed" coordinates from the 37 Billion Mile contest. This one took a bit more doing since the shapes were linked only to the names of stations, and those names were formatted differently from the way the MBTA official data publishes them. So some "fuzzy" string matching was in order, plus hand tweaks.


The result is worth it, I think. It shows the rapid transit lines, the Silver Line, and some of the key bus route stop walksheds (others seem to be missing). They overlap quite a bit so the colors combine into intermediate shades. The walksheds seem to be streets within a 10 minute walk of the station stop, or so. It's interesting to compare the shapes in different locations, especially seeing the effects of different block sizes and connectivity levels on accessibility.


2 comments:

  1. the MBTA's "primary route" completely neglects the 9 bus line trunk that converges on roslindale square and continues up to Forest hills - there are several of these lines that even share more or less the same route, for example, the combined 34+34E would be one of the top 5 in the entire system. I'm not sure why this is left out, but the conspiracy theorist in me thinks that this is to obfuscate the real need to expand the orange line further south.

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  2. This is great! Do you have the code posted to Github?

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