Bay Area Highway Express Bus Corridor Trip Mapping
Summarize express bus trip by highway and interstate corridors leveraging pre-pandemic transit schedules.
Project Resources
Table of Contents
Data Sources
- SF Bay Area 511 GTFS Regional Feed- Downloaded January 2020
- TomTom Road Network Data (2019) - Dataset is not publicly available
- CalTrans HOV Lanes
- CalTrans Express Lanes
Analysis Parameters
Peak Period
For the purposes of this analysis, we define peak period as the morning peak period from 5:00 AM to 10:00 AM
Pre-pandemic transit service
For the purposes of the analysis, we define pre-pandemic transit service as service available in January 2020
Weekday service
Weekday service is represented as a typical non-holiday weekday. The schedules analyzied for this analysis were the schedules for 01/06/2020.
Methodology
Better Bus Buffers - Count Trips on Lines Documentation
Preprocessing of GTFS and blank stop times interpolation was run for a previous analysis. the SQLLite databases were coppied into this project’s directory and re-used.
The high-level methodology provided below is a summary of all processing steps executed in the Count Trips on Lines January 2020 Python Jupyter Notebook. To successfully run the notebook, download the ArcGIS Pro Project and run the Jupyter Notebook within the ArcGIS Pro environment. The code will not work in a stand-alone environment as it relies on layer objects that are automatically added to the map when a geoprocessing function is run.
- Preprocess transit lines using January 2020 GTFS data
- Count trips on lines without combining routes for am peak period and for all-day period
- Summarize by route and number of trips to get max trips per route during am period and all-day period
- Generate pretty transit routes from routes.txt data
- Delete identical routes by route_id and shape
- For routes with duplicate route_id, keep longest route line
- Project pretty route lines to WGS84 UTM Zone 10 North
- Summarize routes by route_id and max length
- Join summary table to routes table
- Select routes w/ count > 1 and length <> max length and delete
- Unjoin summary table
- Join pretty routes and average trips per route table
- Create highway and interstate corridors
- Project highway and interstate data to WGS84 UTM Zone 10 North
- Buffer highway and interstate data by 50 meters and dissolve
- Select junctions from highway and interstate data and create new feature class
- Buffer junctions by 100 meters
- Using editing tools, select all buffered junctions as input and highway and interstate features as target. Split and save edits. (This is a manual process- no arcpy geoprocessing tools available).
- Summarize transit trips within each highway and interstate corridor (See notes below)
- Spatially-join express route trips to corridors
- Summarize am peak period and all day trip counts by corridor
- Join route trip summary table to highway corridor buffers
- Create centerline from polygon highway corridor summary areas
Expected Outcomes
- Regional Maps of Express Bus Trips Summarized by Corridor for AM Peak Period and All-Day Period
- Transit line symbols should be thicker for corridors with higher trip counts and thinner for lower and grouped into 4 buckets.
- Transit line symbol colors should be different depending on trip counts.
- HOV and Express Lanes should be on the map.