

Show HN: San Francisco MUNI Transit Delays, Visualized - bdon
http://bdon.org/transit/

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dougmccune
Trying to compare against the published schedule isn't all that useful. As a
resident of SF, I long ago gave up the idea that you could look up the
scheduled arrival of a bus and plan around that. However, if a bus is supposed
to be running every 12 minutes, that's the number you can plan around (or use
to benchmark the performance of a bus line). So instead of trying to show how
the times compare with the theoretical schedule I think this would be more
useful to show how the buses deviate from the planned interval. If I know it's
a 12 minute bus that means I should never have to wait at any given stop for >
12 minutes. If I'm standing there for 30 minutes, then the bus service is
failing me.

It would also be useful to color code the historic tracks based on which trips
ended up taking something like >10% or 20% longer than the planned time. Again
not worrying about if it was late compared to the scheduled route, but just
whether it was late relative to its own departure time and expected pace.

~~~
timr
It's pretty remarkable how buses in other cities manage to adhere to the
published schedule, but MUNI can't seem to manage. I've ridden buses all over
the world, and MUNI is absolutely the worst at scheduling or latency. It's
almost like they aren't even trying.

And even if you drop the requirement of "stick to the schedule", they still
suck: you can have two lines running the same route up a major thoroughfare
(e.g. 47/49 on Van Ness), and you'll still routinely get three busses back-to-
back, followed by 45 minutes of delay. The only reasonable scheduling
mechanism I've found for MUNI is to know _exactly_ how far away the next bus
is from your stop. Without real-time position information it's an unusable
system, because arrivals are essentially a poisson process.

~~~
dougmccune
I don't know if you rode Muni before they had GPS tracking vs after, but
you're right in that it's the only thing that makes the system at all usable.
I used to use Muni for my daily commute back before they added GPS to the
vehicles and it was an absolute nightmare. At the end of my work day the bus
line I took was supposed to run every 15 minutes. It was fairly common for me
to have to wait 45 minutes for that "15 minute" bus (and watch 3-4 buses on
the same line going the other way pass by). The worst thing is just simply not
knowing how long your wait is. Now at least you can check how far away the
next bus is and know that you're going to be waiting a ridiculously long time
(and call a cab or go to a coffee shop or do _something_ ). Even if the delays
haven't improved (I don't really know), just the ability to track the buses
makes the whole system incredibly more usable.

~~~
dekhn
Agree 100%. I used to work at UCSF Medical Center (Parnassus) and take N Judah
from Outer Sunset.

Typical case was I would start walking towards work (or, towards home in the
evening) when I didn't see a train. Although the N-Judah schedule was "every
15 minutes", there were often ~45min-1hour delays ,which was enough time to
quickly walk from Parnassus to Outer Sunset. Of course, it didn't help that
many trains stopped at 19th or Sunset and turned around rather than going the
whole way (which meant you'd have to wait another 15-45 minutes for the next
train, if it didn't turn around).

Another problem was at the turnaround at La Playa- drivers would disappear
into the Muni bathroom there for half an hour, and block all the subsequent
trains. Eventually (this was ~2000) Muni put a full time supervisor on site
who "watched" the drivers and knocked on the door to get them to go back to
their trains. Eventually they started using the switching in the track to skip
a few trains in front of slow ones, as well.

More recently I've gone back and the psychological advantage of knowing how
long I have to wait has improved the experience a bit.

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timr
Looking at some of the bus routes confirms something I've suspected about MUNI
for a long time: most of the "delays" happen at the beginning of the route.
I've watched bus drivers sit there for 10+ minutes past the departure time on
many occasions, and there appears to be no penalty for the behavior.

I don't know if the drivers are taking a mandated minimum break, waiting in
response to orders from dispatch, or just being lazy, but when I see lots of
long delays at the top/bottom of every single line on these graphs, it really
drives home the source of the problem. I find it difficult to believe that
buses leaving at 5AM are encountering enough traffic to cause 15 minute delays
immediately upon departure.

~~~
cbhl
Are you sure that's not "the bus driver is waiting for his clock to read the
scheduled departure time" or "the bus driver is waiting for people to pay
their fare and board the bus" or "the bus driver turned the bus on early to
warm it up"?

Every bus I've ridden in has signs plastered all over the front saying how you
need to idle it when starting up / shutting down the bus to avoid destroying
the innards, so I would expect there to be long horizontal lines at the
start/end of runs but I wouldn't expect that to be indicative of drivers being
"lazy".

~~~
blaines
Hang out around Embarcadero Station during evening rush or 4th & King
sometime. It's a real mess. I've seen 4 busses running back to back, and some
mornings I'll see 5 or more trains backed up. Not to mention the entire system
already runs at a snail's pace. I generally bike, and I will usually get there
in about 1/2 the time. Compare to Chicago where there's no way I could outrun
a CTA bus, let alone the trains.

~~~
timr
Yeah, that's fine. I expect delays at rush hour. I don't expect to see nearly
every departure for nearly every line delayed by ten minutes or more. That's
what these plots seem to be suggesting.

------
oscilloscope
This graphical schedule visualization is often called Marey's Trains.

[https://mbostock.github.io/protovis/ex/caltrain.html](https://mbostock.github.io/protovis/ex/caltrain.html)

Another project that uses Marey's Trains is an interactive exploration of the
MBTA system.

[http://mbtaviz.github.io/](http://mbtaviz.github.io/)

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birken
Looks interesting.

One minor thing is that if the sorting of the bus lines was numeric rater than
lexical I think it would be easier to find a specific bus line. Also the
limited lines should be right after the regular lines (like 5L should be right
after 5, 9L right after 9), though with a numeric sort this would just be
fixed for free.

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alexmr
Well done. This would be extremely useful in one of the mobile muni apps. I
look at Transporter in the morning to know when to leave for the N, but if it
had an indicator of delays, I'd know that it's time to walk/bike/uber instead.

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njharman
Buses esp 38 Geary and Mission don't look as jacked as I remember them from
~15 years ago. Regularly use to see 3 mission buses bumper to bumper every
30min rather than 1 every 9min.

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Camillo
Could you swap the vertical axis for N Judah? It's a bit confusing to have
King & 4th at the top and Judah at the bottom.

~~~
bdon
This bothers me as well- I'm trying to figure out a consistent way to
determine which direction is "Inbound" and which is Outbound - turns out this
is quite difficult!

In the case of the N, the 4th and King terminus is closer to some abstract
"downtown" point than the other end at Ocean Beach, however this heuristic
doesn't generalize to genuinely "crosstown" routes like the 22.

So this depends on when/if I find a method I'm satisfied with.

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swang
Go home 6 MUNI, you're drunk:
[http://imgur.com/q4FDcWC](http://imgur.com/q4FDcWC)

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refurb
What do the short black lines represent? I see some lines start, then abruptly
end. Is that a train changing route assignments?

~~~
bdon
Yes, it's likely vehicles that change their assigned route or are moving
between depots.

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justizin
This would be a lot more interesting with data about private bus locations
interlaced with coordinated time.

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evanm
This is awesome. Nice work.

Accurately shows the N-Judah ridiculousness I experienced this morning.

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carlosdp
You can actually see the delay the switch toward Embarcadero station causes
outbound on KT/N.

