Mass

transit and Data Visualization: Twin Strands of Evolution

Why do we travel?
The daily or routine movement of people from their homestead to other locations in order to procure necessities has informed our way of life throughout human history. In point of fact, the form of human society in effect until about 8,000 years ago is termed a hunter-gatherer or forager/hunter-gathereri society, which denotes a life of routine forays to surrounding areas to obtain food and necessities and/or a highly nomadic lifestyle in which communities or clans continuously migrate with the movement of game, the changing of seasons, and the accessibility of harvestable foodstuffs. Though human society is no longer classified as a hunter-gatherer society, we continue to travel to meet the same basic needs that compelled our predecessors, mainly, to work, obtain goods and services, and participate in personally and/or culturally relevant activities. And as our societys infrastructure has grown more complex, fluctuating and multi-layered, the way in which we travel has also evolved into highly coordinated, increasingly complex systems that can support large numbers of travelers and a variety of travel requirements and endpoints. Toward that end, those systems have required increasingly sophisticated mechanisms and tools, such as data visualizations of routes, road conditions, and incidents, to manage the overlapping streams of service that a commuting workforce expects.

The Advent of Mass Transit

The advent of mass transit systems can be traced to the post industrial revolution migration of people from the countryside to metropolitan centers in search of work. The emergence of commercial centers, which drew vast numbers of workers from increasingly remote locations, was a compelling opportunity that private industry recognized could be capitalized on. In 1828 France, the first horse-drawn omnibusii (which was operated by private entrepreneurs) was used to ferry as many as 50 people across town. In 1832, in New York City, rails were installed throughout town to provide a smoother roadbed and, consequently, a less bumpy ride for passengers. In 1873, San Francisco used steam power from a central station to pull cable cars along rails throughout the city. Chicago and other cities throughout the U.S. would soon follow suite. Six years later, Berlin introduced the electric railway into popular use. With each evolution of mass transit, from the omnibus-on-rails to the electric train, the guiding principal was to provide a more efficient means of carrying a larger group of people from one point to another. And as mass transit grew, the mobility it offered large numbers of people enabled existing cities and communities to expand and created new urban centers wholly dependent upon a system of transport that would support routine transit from home to work and back again.

You Are Here: How Mass Transit Agencies Benefit from Data Visualization Tools
When you look at a map, youre looking at a data visualization tool, a tool that tells you where you are and where you might go. If mobility is integraliii to urban life, it follows that agility, or the ability to see a visual representation of every point of entry or exit for a mass transit system, ground conditions along each route, and real-time demand fluctuations, so that you can anticipate and rapidly disseminate

suitable alternatives in the event of any disruption to service, is a prerequisite for mass transit operators wishing to win urban riders away from their cars. Enter the subway (or underground) route map and timetable; a way to communicate to riders at any point along a route where a bus or metro would stop and when. Considered the father of all subway maps, an elegantly timeless form of data visualization was created by London-based electrical draughtsman Harry Beckiv in 1933. Becks underground map was based on the circuit diagrams he drew, and took certain geographic liberties in the interest of visual simplicity. Despite a degree of geographic oversimplification, the maps vivid clarity and ease of comprehension was a smash success in London and made the map a template for transport maps the world over. This imaginative design, revolutionary at the time, survives today (with some modifications and additions).

Ground Traffic Control: From Static to Dynamic Data Visualizations

The transit maps and timetables of the 20th century were chiefly static documents, showing where a bus or train would stop and an approximate time of arrival. But, the maps and timetables of today are dynamically fluid, adaptable to a wide variety of users (transit operators, end-users, law enforcement, and crowd control personnel), able to incorporate inputs from multiple sources, integrate historical data, and help in preemptive decision-making. Modern forms of data visualization offer business intelligence tools essential to an industry increasingly constrained by funding cutsv and declining ridership. One example of the critical role various forms of business intelligence, such as InetSofts business dashboard software, can play in improving modern mass transit operations can be found in the San Diego Metropolitan Transit Systems (MTS) Comprehensive Operational Analysis (COA). In response to funding constraints, San Diego initiated this in-depth analysis to assess a potential restructuring of its services. In order to maximize operational efficacy, the analysis sought to better understand key performance indicators influencing ridership, such as population density, commuting patterns over a ten year period, and proximity of active users to potential transit hubs, to correlate where transit services should be located. A geographic information system (a form of data visualization) was used to graphically depict rider population and transit patterns from 2000 2010, which enabled MTS to create a user-relevant proposal for weekday rider coverage for the Central to Mid-City area. The approved proposals new service plan resulted in an anticipated savings of $9 million in annual operating subsidies through improved operational efficiencies and increased ridershipvi. Another example of the demonstrative value data visualization tools provide mass transit operators can be seen in the High Point, North Carolinas use of them to generate integrated transportation systems. High Point has fourteen bus routes broken down into twelve weekday routes and two alternate Saturday routes. The original series of twelve maps was created with CAD, or computer-aided design software, an application commonly used in generating engineering blueprints. The series was extremely tedious to update, because no attribute data was attached to the bus routes and stops, making them perpetually static.

The city determined it needed to migrate the route data to a more agile system, one which could update bus stop locations and attributes using recent aerial ortho-photography and then combine the routes (many of which overlap) onto one system-wide map. The solution decided upon was a dashboard software application (Maplex) that could automatically place and resize stop labels on the fly. These new maps were very well received by the public with a striking byproduct being their incorporation into the refugee assimilation efforts of the local World Relief Office (WRO). The WRO High Point Refugee Care Program helps ease refugees' transition into the community by using the transit system to meet their daily needs. Department of Transportation staff trained World Relief Office staff in how to adapt the High Point mapping system to a specific users home and desired travel endpoints (e.g., doctors offices, stores, etc.), enabling WRO staff to show refugees how to adapt it to their specific needs, creating in essence a virtual copilot for them. In the process, High Points mapping system has become an indispensable tool for helping refugees adapt to their new environment and gain a greater degree of mobility.vii Data Visualization Tools Support the Future of Mass Transit The automobile continues to dominate urban transportation, having captured more than 95% of the market by 1983viii. As the environmental impact of widespread car culture has come to the fore of public concern, the opportunity for mass transit to regain a larger share of urban trip taking begins to take form. For elective (or choice) riders, field experiments have demonstrated that service quality factors such as travel time, frequency and reliability carry greater weight in choosing one travel mode over another, and furthermore, that improving those basic factors correlates with increased ridership. And of all the variables which determine whether or not an elective rider will choose mass transit over their car the most decisive is superiority of service. To provide such service, mass transit operators are employing sophisticated data visualization tools that evolve with the needs of the MT agency and the end-users it serves in real time. Many companies, such as InetSoft, are creating ever-dynamic, community-specific tools for mass transit. InetSoft works with mass transit agencies to understand the factors influencing travel mode choice and to translate them into public and executive dashboard tools that integrate historical data, multiple entry and exit points, and current weather and road conditions, that provide a vivid tableau of options for optimal transport to multiple destinations and, ultimately, provide a level of service that enables mass transit to compete with and overtake the automobile in traveler satisfaction.
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http://archaeology.about.com/od/hterms/g/hunter_gather.htm http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/368374/mass-transit iii http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/368374/mass-transit iv http://www.infovis.info/index.php?cmd=search&words=subway&mode=normal v http://www.infovis.info/index.php?cmd=search&words=subway&mode=normal vi http://www.sandiego.gov/planning/genplan/pdf/peir/traffic.pdf vii http://www.highpointnc.gov/transit/ and
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http://worldrelief.org/Page.aspx?pid=1964 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/368374/mass-transit/64255/The-automobile-and-mass- transportation