Anyone who rides public transit knows that timetables are a crapshoot. Some days Muni delivers you across town on schedule; other days you’re stranded at your stop, staring at a blank LED ticker, and knowing there’s a good chance you’ll die and skeletonize before the bus pulls up.
Now, an interactive map tells you how long it’ll take pubic transit to get anywhere in the city. Designed by transportation planner Chris Pangilinan and UC Berkeley grad student Dan Howard, the map analyzes past performance data — rather than schedules — to predict commute times. (The sample size was 60,000 trips taken between January and March 2014). Even more ingenious, it’ll tell you the likelihood of reaching certain areas of the city in a half hour compared with which areas there’s no way in hell you can make in that time.
The map lets you filter by best case, average, and worst case scenarios, while a slider at the bottom estimates travel times ranging from 15 minutes to 100 minutes.
As Pangilinan told CityLab, the difference between a good day and a bad day is unbelievable. If the city’s transit agencies could always perform on the good day standard, it’d be the equivalent of building a subway extension or rolling out many more buses.
Speaking of which, the map will eventually be updated with 2015 data, which could help SFMTA determine the parts of the city that need transit improvements. “That makes it much easier to argue for transportation projects based on their merits as opposed to based on what part of the city screams the loudest,” Pangilinan said.
[via CityLab; image courtesy of UC Berkeley]
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