Updated Frequencies

August 9th, 2013

Below is a visualization of weekly frequency for each of SORTA’s routes, derived from the just-released GTFS data. The area of each square is directly proportional to the number of trips a route will make each week after the August 18th, 2013 service changes. The #1 at the top will make a total  of 232 weekly trips. The m+ at the bottom will make 595. The route with the most weekly trips is the 43 with 1,289.1 I’ll let them talk for themselves now:

Visualisation of weekly frequency for SORTA's 2013 service changes

I’ve been meaning to write a really simple little graph-generating script for a while. I’ve been unhappily living with Excel and OpenOffice forever as has everyone, and their ability to make visualisations is just NOTHING compared to the simplicity of SVG combined with a language like PHP. Just a couple hours coding and a little time tweaking in Inkscape and boom! Coloured squares. Oh yeah.

*does a little dance*

I didn’t choose the colours by the way. Those were in the data in a field marked simply ‘route_colors’. Someone at SORTA picked them. Any colour theorists in the audience want to offer a psychoanalysis?

Show 1 footnote

  1. A trip here is somewhat loosely defined. In almost every case, it’s the journey from the far end of a route’s path to the other. The journey back to the starting point is another trip. I’m being a touch lazy and not looking at the actual shapes though. I know there have been instances in the past, though I can’t say for sure if there are any cases of it in this data, where for some technical reason a trip as just defined is split into two or more trips for the purpose of encoding it neatly in the data. If that’s happening here, it will distort the visualization and I won’t know any better. I simply haven’t looked. I’m tired and it’s my bed time. Plus, a quick glance over and it seems to pass the smell test. No huge outliers that I immediately notice. ↩

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