Ghost Buses

[lauriemerrell]

About the group

As of early 2024, this group is winding down active development. We don't plan to add new features at this time.

During the pandemic, many transit riders have noted that transit service has seemed less reliable. People have complained about “ghost buses”, where apps or trackers claim a bus is coming and it never shows up.

This breakout group uses public data (the CTA Bus Tracker API and CTA GTFS schedule dataset) to assess the discrepancy between scheduled and actual service levels, to understand the prevalence and geographic distribution of “ghost buses”.

Relevant article (thanks Francisco for sharing on Slack!): Data analysis found CTA has only been running about half its scheduled Blue Line runs

Group leaders

Laurie Merrell - @lauriemerrell on CHN Slack

Who we're looking for

• Transit enthusiasts!
• People who want to do research or connect with others in the Chicago transit advocacy and data space
• Data people, any tech stack (Excel, Python, R, etc.)
• People who know how to scrape data from APIs
• Data viz or front end people
• People who want to learn!

Tools

Our data scraper is written in Python, data is stored in AWS S3, and our front end is written in React. Folks of all technical backgrounds are welcome!

Relevant Links

Our website: https://ghostbuses.com
Data/back-end repo: https://github.com/chihacknight/chn-ghost-buses
Front-end repo: https://github.com/chihacknight/ghost-buses-frontend

Where we meet

We meet after the Chi Hack Night presentation every Tuesday evening! To access our Zoom link, you can join the #ghost-buses-breakout channel in the Chi Hack Night Slack (http://slackme.chihacknight.org/).

Chi Hack Night slack channel

#ghost-buses-breakout