Transit Service Quality Map

November 17th, 2010
mbta, transit
After looking at the maps from yesterday showing how long it would take on transit to reach various places given a starting place, I thought it would be nice to make another map that shows the "transit service quality" in an area. Roughly, this would mean "how long does it take me to get places on transit starting from here?" A smart map would know that some places are more desirable as destinations (more people want to go to copley square than west medford square), but I'm treating all points on the map as equally valuable. So on these maps, each point represents the average time it would take to get to anywhere else on the map, calculated using tillberg's maps.

On the greyscale maps the range is 45min (white) to 117min (black). On the colored map the ranges are:

  • 45-50: red
  • 50-55: orange
  • 55-60: yellow
  • 65-70: lime green
  • 70-80: green
  • 80-90: teal
  • 90-100: light blue
  • 100-117: medium blue

If you want to do further work with these, the small greyscale one can be thought of as an array of averages of the tillberg maps, scaled to be between 45min and 117min. The other two maps necessarily have distortions from the resizing or the quantizing.

Referenced in: MBTA Transit Service Quality Map Now Responsive

Comment via: substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Tuberculosis Considered As Dating Strategy

Against some evopsych

via Thing of Things July 8, 2025

Retrospective on life tracking and effectiveness systems

I’ve been doing life tracking for around 10 years, and this post is looking back at some things I learned from the data (since my previous retrospective in 2017). Highlights include what I get out of the Oura ring, correlations between sleep and deep work…

via Victoria Krakovna July 4, 2025

Elixir's Last Dance

On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew from across the country just to hear Elixir play one la…

via Lily Wise's Blog Posts June 5, 2025

more     (via openring)