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

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