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

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.

  1. Preprocess transit lines using January 2020 GTFS data
  2. Count trips on lines without combining routes for am peak period and for all-day period
  3. Summarize by route and number of trips to get max trips per route during am period and all-day period
  4. Generate pretty transit routes from routes.txt data
  5. Delete identical routes by route_id and shape
  6. 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
  7. Join pretty routes and average trips per route table
  8. 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).
  9. 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
  10. Create centerline from polygon highway corridor summary areas

Expected Outcomes

Results