I’m James Kebinger, currently a Software Engineer at PatientsLikeMe.
I’m an experienced Software Engineer and Web Developer with a variety of skills including Java and Ruby/Ruby on Rails and interests including usability and data visualization. I recently got a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Tufts University, and I’m determined to o
I’m James Kebinger, currently a Master’s candidate in Computer Science at Tufts University in Medford, MA.
I’m also an experienced Software Engineer and Web Developer with a variety of skills including Java and Ruby/Ruby on Rails.
I put together an animation of all the rail traffic in the course of a day on the MBTA’s red, blue, green and orange lines, including the Mattapan line. Its a great way to see just how complicated the system is that takes me to work every day, and perhaps be a little more patient next time things go less than perfect!
The current version of the animation assumes stop take no time (as does the scheduling data).
I’d thought about doing this before, but it would have taken screen scraping schedule information off the site. I learned recently through a developer outreach that the Massachusetts Department of Transportation is running that the MBTA had released their schedule information in the Google transit feed specification (GTFS). With the data in hand, I went to work using the ruby-processing wrapper of the excellent Processing graphics toolkit.
By using your ruby-processing wrapper on this subway data, does that make it Ruby on Rails? 🙂
What might it look like if you estimated every stop to be x seconds long? (I honestly have no idea what the average time stopped is).
Extremely cool. For your enjoyment, here are some other transit system animations built from public transit feeds:
Toronto: http://myttc.ca/stats
Portland: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ewedistrict/2549055956/ (that one’s mine)
Cheers,
B