How-To How to Scrape WMATA's Real-Time Train and Bus Movement Data Most large transit agencies have research groups whose full time job it is to analyze operational data, but they often face strict restrictions publishing data. With historic records of real-time data though, academics and nonprofits can perform their own creative analyses.
Transit Behind the Scenes of Seattle's Transportation Infrastructure A few weeks ago, I went to Seattle on an exchange program with between the Seattle Chapters of Young Professionals in Transportation (YPT). I was able to go on behind the scenes tour of transportation infrastructure throughout the city.
How-To Using Parks and Transit in QGIS to Orient Local Readers A little while back, there was a report from NYCDOT called Bus Forward. While I worked on some of the analysis in the report, one thing I noticed was that the analyst behind
Transit Why Street Patterns can Make or Break Buses For a couple years in high school I took the DC Metro to the bus to get home. While I often exaggerate the numbers when talking about my commute, even today Citymapper says
How-To Using pgRouting to Calculate Transit Catchment Areas In order to show the effects of a grid vs loop and lollipop road network, I downloaded the GTFS files for Ride On bus here. These are simply txt files, with routes, stops,
Transport Streetmix, A Street Section Builder for Activists and Professionals Alike Back in 2013, San Fransisco's Department of Public Works wanted to find ways to facilitate public feedback for the Second Street Improvement Project. Traditionally, planners have used paper cutouts and drawings to get
Personal Photos from the Chihuly Exhibit at the Bronx Botanical Gardens A couple of weekends ago, my girlfriend and I went to the Bronx Botanical Gardens. At the time, there was a Chihuly special exhibit which we wanted to check out. The two of
How-To Setting Up Scoop as a Windows Package Manager MacOS has Homebrew. Linux has APT. Windows sort of has OneGet. I dual-boot Linux on my desktop, but unfortunately that doesn't seem too feasible on my Surface Book. Since there's a whole bunch
Research Access to Banking Services in Washington D.C. As I spoke about a little bit in a previous post, inadequate access to savings tools is a classic example of a poverty trap. Without basic banking services, smoothing consumption levels and preparing
Transport A Rainy Earth Day in NYC Last Saturday (April 22nd, 2017) was Earth Day, and the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) set up a whole bunch of events here all across the city. I took a Citi Bike to
Personal Say hi to Arwen! Hi everyone, This isn't a technical post, life has been kind of hectic the last few weeks. I've also spent most of my personal free time playing the fantastic Legend of Zelda: Breath
Video Games Predicting Katowice 2017 Note: I wrote this post before the matches were played. Overall, I was pretty happy since I went three for four. I only had Team 8 at a 54% chance. Most surprising to
Economics Development Economics (and the United States) Part I: Savings Theory During my Master's degree, I took a course in Development Economics from Cynthia Kinnan* (which had nothing to do with transportation directly). Throughout the course, I noticed that many of the concepts in
QGIS Mapping the IP Addresses in the GRIZZLY STEPPE Report The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the director of National Intelligence (DNI) issues a Joint Analysis Report (JAR) called GRIZZLY STEPPE. The analysis attributes the security compromises during the
Video Games Scraping Heroes of the Storm Competitive Information with Scrapy I have previously written about my Glicko ratings of competitive Heroes of the Storm (HotS) teams, and how I put that information into a SQLite database. Up to this point though, I have
How-To Setting Up SQLite on Windows 10 I recently wrote a post on rating teams in Heroes of the Storm and used a regular CSV to store all the data for my ratings. To be honest, that worked perfectly fine
Video Games Rating Teams in Heroes of the Storm As a side project, I decided I wanted to predict the winner of BlizzCon 2016 in Heroes of the Storm (HotS). Obviously the tournament just ended, but I still wanted to complete my
How-To Setting up Internet in a New Apartment I recently moved into a new apartment in New York City and decided this was a good time to set up a reliable and fast internet connection. Thanks to a mix of Ars
Transport Is the Michigan Left actually better? I was recently visiting a friend in Detroit and I was curious about whether the 'Michigan Left' was actually the safer and more efficient solution that Michigan's Department of Transportation (MDOT) claims it
How-To Recreating FiveThirtyEight's Footer FiveThirtyEight's charts are some of the most memorable data visualizations in the world and several people have put a lot of effort into recreating their style. While FiveThirtyEight keeps their actual ggplot2 themes
Transport Modelling a Day of Trips in 3D In a Survey Design and Analysis course that I'm taking currently, we recently read a paper from Cynthia Chen et al. on "The promises of big data and small data for travel
Review MyKee Titanium Multi-Tool Key Review Imagine this situation: you just sat down at your desk. You just got your new BB-8 in the mail that you had to order to your work address because your significant other said
Transport The Original Frank-Wolfe Algorithm in Octave (MATLAB) I recently took a course in network optimization where we learned a variety of ways to solve the static traffic assignment problem (TAP). For one of our problem sets, we had to use
Transport How Loyal are Transit Users? In marketing there is concept called brand loyalty. From the Wikipedia post I just linked: Brand loyalty is defined as positive feelings towards a brand and dedication to purchase the same product or
Personal HTTPS Finally! For anyone who actually reads this, you may notice the little lock that is up in the corner of your URL bar next to the website name. Thanks to the wonderful Let's Encrypt
