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Amtrak's data could help riders and employees -- too bad it's so hard to find
Amtrak’s data could help riders and employees — too bad it’s so hard to find
TECHNOLOGY By Andrew Carpenter (Mobility Lab) September 24, 2018
This article originally appeared in Mobility Lab.
Amtrak is a valuable resource for the transportation ecosystem – especially in the Northeast – but few people know that. ... Opening its data could help Amtrak tell its story and provide context for delays and service disruptions, creating transparency that could build support for the system. While Amtrak is working towards this, its data isn’t publicly available yet.
Transportation Techies – a Washington, DC-based meet-up group of transportation data nerds – met to share their travails in manipulating and visualizing Amtrak’s information, which turned out to be no simple task compared to the myriad projects people are able to pursue with local bicycle, pedestrian, and transit data. ... Turns out, it’s hard to play with Amtrak’s data.
Sunny Zheng walked the room through the process of unwrapping Amtrak’s publicly-facing data feed on tracking real-time train positions. Zheng wanted to build a web tool to track train positions throughout the network, but instead encountered an obfuscated data feed, which was intentionally hidden through code. ... Through multiple layers of reverse engineering messy lines of code, Zheng uncovered comments from Amtrak’s developer laughing about misleading outside coders and hiding its data feeds.
Chris Juckins and a colleague built a similar tool to track on-time performance since, on occasion, the trains don’t run on time. Because there is no direct way to feed data into an on-time tracker, the tool uses Amtrak’s Train Status page to feed an on-time performance database. This allows Juckins to create visuals of how trains behave over their entire route, and even to track the historical reliability of any specific train.
....
Andrew Carpenter lives all things mobility as a program associate at the Community Transportation Association of America and as a tech reporter for Mobility Lab.
TECHNOLOGY By Andrew Carpenter (Mobility Lab) September 24, 2018
This article originally appeared in Mobility Lab.
Amtrak is a valuable resource for the transportation ecosystem – especially in the Northeast – but few people know that. ... Opening its data could help Amtrak tell its story and provide context for delays and service disruptions, creating transparency that could build support for the system. While Amtrak is working towards this, its data isn’t publicly available yet.
Transportation Techies – a Washington, DC-based meet-up group of transportation data nerds – met to share their travails in manipulating and visualizing Amtrak’s information, which turned out to be no simple task compared to the myriad projects people are able to pursue with local bicycle, pedestrian, and transit data. ... Turns out, it’s hard to play with Amtrak’s data.
Sunny Zheng walked the room through the process of unwrapping Amtrak’s publicly-facing data feed on tracking real-time train positions. Zheng wanted to build a web tool to track train positions throughout the network, but instead encountered an obfuscated data feed, which was intentionally hidden through code. ... Through multiple layers of reverse engineering messy lines of code, Zheng uncovered comments from Amtrak’s developer laughing about misleading outside coders and hiding its data feeds.
Link to tweet
Chris Juckins and a colleague built a similar tool to track on-time performance since, on occasion, the trains don’t run on time. Because there is no direct way to feed data into an on-time tracker, the tool uses Amtrak’s Train Status page to feed an on-time performance database. This allows Juckins to create visuals of how trains behave over their entire route, and even to track the historical reliability of any specific train.
....
Andrew Carpenter lives all things mobility as a program associate at the Community Transportation Association of America and as a tech reporter for Mobility Lab.