May 24, 2018
#TransitTechiesNYC: A quick recap of the inaugural Meetup
A quick recap of the first Transit Techies NYC Meetup: Christening the Code Train, held on Wed, May 23, 2018
Last night, coders, transit geeks, and transit-geeks-turned-coders alike descended upon Hudson Yards for the first Transit Techies NYC Meetup held at Intersection. Beside the stunning view from Intersection’s office and a sizable pile of pizza boxes, the Meetup featured a really cool lineup of speakers covering a wide array of projects relating to transit and technology. Michael Zhang and I have been blogging about data and NJ Transit recently and thought this Meetup would be a great place to learn about interesting work and people in the transit space. Here’s a quick recap of the event!
Introduction
When we got to Intersection, there were already 30–40 techies already in the space hanging out and chatting. Intersection shares a multi-level space with Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs so some Sidewalkers (is this a thing?) were also in the house. There were probably around 80 people at the event by the time it started, which is really encouraging for the Meetup moving forward.
Organizers Kozhy Koh and Tyler Green got things started with a humorous Powerpoint; with that, the first Transit Techies NYC Meetup was underway! Four speakers were scheduled to present their transit tech projects to the group.
TransitFlow
Will Geary took the floor first to discuss his open-source TransitFlow project. The project takes General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data from transit agencies and produces animated transit maps using Processing, a coding language for the visual arts.
Timetables are the primary means of communicating transit information and they are decidedly not visual; they’re often confusing and it’s difficult to tell what times of the day have more or less train activity. TransitFlow tries to make transit communication more visual and intuitive by animating trains; I wish I’d found it before my previous article where I animated the NJ Transit system…using Plotly.
Will also shared Rami Saab’s super interesting “audiolizer” project which uses TransitFlow to produce music from transit schedules.
GoPhillyGo
Kathryn Killebrew was up next to talk about GoPhillyGo, a multi-modal, non-car, transit planning tool for residents of Philadelphia. Given two locations, GoPhillyGo tells you how to get from point A to point B without using a car. With clear bike, transit, and bike+transit routing, Philadelphians don’t have to fumble through different modes of Google Maps on the go when they leave their cars behind.
GoPhillyGo takes a really interesting community-inspired approach to its website as well. It features local events in the Philly area, which users can then click on and see how to get to without using a car. With bike share, electric skateboards, and electrical scooters becoming more mainstream, I can see a larger need for people wanting to combine alternative personal and public transportation options to go carless. GoPhillyGo’s routing is done using OpenTripPlanner.
Citibikes in the Outer Boroughs
Jiaxu Zhou, a former Masters student at NYU, talked about using data to predict Citibike usage in the outer NYC boroughs. Citibike is expanding its coverage in 2018 and Jiaxu’s work (conducted in 2015–16) measured potential usage of new stations in the outer boroughs, notably Brooklyn. Transportation availability and demographic features are combined to quantify how much a census block group will utilize a proposed Citibike dock nearby. The potential usage is color mapped and plotted on a map using a GIS library.
This project was really interesting from both a technical and societal perspective. While data was used to model and tackle a difficult problem, the project also touches on the inclusiveness and equity of new-age transit options in cities.
Transit Explorer by Sidewalk Labs
Dan Vanderkam was up last to discuss Transit Explorer, a tool built by Sidewalk Labs to help New Yorkers figure out how long it takes to get to regions of the city via public transit. Transit Explorer uses isochrones, or maps that are colored according to values, to show you travel times to different parts of Manhattan from your apartment in, say, Williamsburg.
With the impending closure of the L train connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn (the ominous “L-maggedon”), TransitExplorer has allowed users to remove the L train and see how badly the closure will impact them. Sidewalk Labs is currently building a revamped transit explorer for Toronto here.
All in all, the first Transit Techies NYC Meetup set the stage nicely for the community to grow in the future. I’m interested in experimenting with (and possibly contributing to) some of the work I learned about, such as TransitFlow. We talked about some super cool projects, as well as new public initiatives and technologies; I’m really looking forward to the next one! You can join the techies on Meetup.
If you enjoyed this recap, please 👏 this article below. I’ll try to make it to more transit and sustainability related Meetups in the coming months, so follow my Medium profile to stay posted on future recaps!
Here are some transit tech-y articles I’ve written recently:
