How Not To Get Stuck On SF Public Transit: Interactive Map Shows Best, Worst Case Scenario
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) - Need to get somewhere in San Francisco in less than half an hour? If you've lived in the city long you know it can be tough gauge just how reliable public transit will in getting you there. But now comes an interactive map aimed at giving you a realistic expectation of how far you can get in a specific amount of time.
Berkeley engineering grad Dan Howard has developed the tool, which lets you mark your current location and color codes the rest of San Francisco to give you an idea how long it will take you to get where you want to go. City streets are marked blue for 15 minute routes, green for thirty and warmer colors for longer trips, based on 15 minute increments.
Howard says the idea came about when he was a masters candidate working for Muni. He and his supervisor were talking about the best ways to illustrate to riders the planned improvements to the system, but were not satisfied with existing mapping tools.
"Other maps were based on schedule data, and I wanted to use actual bus locations from past days, to show people how the system is actually behaving and to reflect the many, many times that the bus doesn't run on-schedule. Also, many maps model walking as an expanding circle radiating outward from each stop, and I didn't like that simplification either because it didn't take into account dead ends or long walking detours, or our famous hills. So my map takes all of these things into account and it even models that a person walks slower as they go up a hill, with their speed getting slower and slower as the hill gets steeper," said Howard.
The map even lets users toggle between best or worst case scenarios on transit.
"Sometimes Muni is on your side, and sometimes the system seems as if it does everything it can to stop you from getting to your destination on time, hence the "angel halo" and the "devil horns" for the icons. For all these reasons, I decided building the visualization from scratch would be my best bet," noted Howard, who said that he regularly takes transit and wants officials to see what riders deal with. "Most people suffer in silence and either hope things will get better, or count the days until they can get stop riding the bus. I want our transit options to be a dependable option for these folks and for people to choose to ride transit. My approach uses the data we have on the vehicles to speak for these riders in terms of wait times, reliability and overall travel times. I know that service is unreliable and slow too much of the time, and I want to make those instances stick out like a sore thumb to transit planners and managers, so they can fix the problem. It's nearly impossible to fix what you can't see!"
Howard said he hopes that his tool and others can provide transit operators with more reliable information to improve the system with limited funds.
