AwesomeBus: A visualization of public transportation in Seattle

Seattle has an extensive public transportation system, which will continue to grow in the coming decades. However, successful physical expansion of the transit network also requires public awareness and interest in the growing network. Currently, there exist popular tools to generate directions for point-to-point trips and to see real-time arrival data at any given stop, but mass transit riders lack a comprehensive tool for intuitively exploring the entire transit network without planning a specific trip or looking at real-time data for a specific stop. Our work, AwesomeBus, is a d3.js visualization that provides an interactive tool to explore Seattle's public transportation system. AwesomeBus enables exploration by showing every transit route and stop in King County on a detailed geographic map, and helps the user make sense of the information through intuitive visual encodings and multiple selection and filtering techniques.

Software

Try it online here.

Materials

Acknowledgements

Transit data is provided by King County Metro, and maps are provided by Mapbox and OpenStreetMap.