MTA

Problem Description

Several studies indicated that NYC has the slowest buses in the nation. These conclusions were mostly drawn from surveys of a small subset of buses in the city. We would like to assess these claims and study the performance in NYC buses through data. In particularly, we will be looking at the MTA BusTime data that has been reporting location pings of roughly 5000 buses along with route information every 30 seconds since early 2014. A preliminary study at CUSP has generated profiles for all bus lines within an 8-month period from September 8th, 2014 to June 15th, 2015, looking at only weekdays and excluding the holiday period from December 15th, 2014 to January 8th, 2015. The profiles are currently available at: http://www.busvis.org. Our challenge is to identify "problematic" findings, e.g. buses running with extremely slow or extremely fast speeds, indicating some issues either in the data quality or in actual bus performance. By using publicly available datasets, we would also like to learn about the causes of these findings.