MBTA Service Frequency

December 12th, 2009
mbta, programming, tech, transport
The MBTA publishes a transit feed primarily it can appear in google transit. The feed is publicly available, however, which means I can play with it. There is a lot of data, enough that I can't get GoogleTransitDataFeed to load it all to memory. I want to look more at gtdf and possibly use it in the future, but for now I'm just happy to read the csv files in the feed. I'm still thinking about how to display the data in interesting ways, but an easy first one is to show service frequency at each stop:
There is a really large svg (which I made with svgfig (I only used a tiny fraction of svgfig's capabilities, it's really powerful, especially for plotting graphs)) linked behind the png. It might be big enough to crash your browser.

The grey lines are the shapes the mbta publishes in shapes.txt. They appear to be the commuter rail and rapid transit lines, including the silver line. The yellow dots are all the stops in stops.txt with an area proportional to the number of times they're listed in stop_times.txt, which I think corresponds to their service frequency. For single pixel stops this does not hold because all stops visited at least once get at least one pixel. I've cropped the image to leave out the ten most distant stops in each direction. The map is projected by calling the gps coordinates screen coordinates (after translation and scaling) which probably introduces some distortion. I merged stops that were really close.

Referenced in: Markov Me

Comment via: facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Ozy at LessOnline!

I will once again be a guest at LessOnline, alongside many other writers whom you no doubt like less than you like me: Scott Alexander, dynomight, Georgia Ray, David Friedman, Nicholas Decker, Jacob Falkovich, Kelsey Piper, Alicorn, Aella, etc.

via Thing of Things March 23, 2026

Daycares and the Brown School

As someone in Somerville I notice that there are quite high prices regarding childcare. The average family in Somerville pays $1,100 to $3,500 for daycare per month, and I want to make the costs more affordable. I have also noticed that housing is quite …

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts March 22, 2026

2025-26 New Year review

This is an annual post reviewing the last year and setting intentions for next year. I look over different life areas (work, health, parenting, effectiveness, etc) and analyze my life tracking data. Highlights include a minimal group house, the usefulness…

via Victoria Krakovna January 19, 2026

more     (via openring)