Visualizing Transit Reliability (Or Not)

Douglas Hanks reports on a new real-time tracker of Metrorail trains in Miami, created by the advocacy group Transit Alliance. The tracker uses online data from the county to calculate the number of late trains, presenting their findings in a colorful and useable online display.

On the Metrorail Audit page, each train is represented by a dot with a color representing the arrival time. While the page shows today's trains in chronological order, it also offers a view of the previous day's trains grouped by their arrival performance. The site also lets us know that at the time of this writing there have been 235 on-time trains, 618 late or bunched trains, and 111 ghost trains in the past week.

Jarrett Walker picked up the news of the Transit Alliance tracker and gave it a stamp of approval, noting especially the tracker's focus on headways (wait times) rather than on-time performance.  Walker concludes his post about the tracker with an appeal for an institute "to create a database of reliability info across many agencies, searchable many ways — and always based on this headway reliability rather than on-time performance."

Hat tip to Rachel Dovey for sharing news of the Transit Alliance tracker.