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Show HN: Visualizing public transport performance in New Zealand (missinglink.link)
5 points by allig256 on Nov 14, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
I've been tracking public transport data in NZ for a couple of years now, and have now built a site for its display. Public transport is quite a contentious issue here; what's better than to inform decisions with data?

I’m posting this to ask some switched on people what the best step going forward for would be for this project. If someone was building a similar site for your city, what would you want to see?

https://github.com/allister-grange/missinglink




A couple of casual thoughts to get the ball rolling.

1) This is really cool work. I did note that at this stage the key/only metric involved seems to be Time, unless my quick look missed something. By itself, isolated, I'm sure quite a few conclusions can be drawn from that data, but even moreso, I think that collation with other key data areas such as passenger numbers, traffic intensity data, even things like weather - and I'm sure, plenty of other things I've not thought of - could greatly bolster the data's analytical potential.

2) This is subjective of course - but something feels off (by which I mean, not an entirely neutral presentation of data) to me, about the presentation's critical or punitive framing : things like the celebratory "leader board" of largest delays, complete with gold medal emoji, or the site's name seeming a sort of play on "where's that late bus?!".


1) Unfortunately I am already squeezing as much as I can get out of the existing data. The public APIs (there's a different one for each city) don't cover all fields in the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). I would love to incorporate more data as time goes on, I hadn't thought of sources of data outside of the public transport providers themselves, weather would be a great example to extrapolate comparisons from, thank you!

2) Yeah, I must admit there is a bias at play. Obviously there are a couple of parts of the site that have a negative spin. In an ideal world, there'd be no negative spin to create!


It seems right that a night bus and ferries are more able to keep to time.

The thing’s holding up day busses are traffic and with trains it is the cascade effect of problems when rerouting options are limited.




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