The Nashville Software School and WeGo Public Transit partnered to look at bus speed data using the Swiftly Speed Map API. A team of students conducted analyses to identify various hot spots where service consistently slows down.
“The project with WeGo gave our students the opportunity to work through the data analysis process from beginning to end,” said Christopher Wright, data analytics instructor, Nashville Software School.
“It was powerful to get a quantitatively driven result that confirmed where we suspected we had challenges,” added Dan Freudberg, deputy chief operating officer of operations systems, WeGo. “The visualizations of the trouble areas are also very compelling for communicating these hotspots to stakeholders and partner agencies, such as Nashville Department of Transportation.”
Nashville Software School is a community-focused non-profit that provides education for adults in software development, data analytics and data science.
“The transit data is really interesting, and extremely detailed in the depth of information the data provides,” said Tony Pitorri, a Nashville Software School student. “I was surprised by the amount and type of transit data available to us.”
Fellow student Mylah Kate Gainey added, “I never would’ve thought twice about how intricate an analysis of transit data could be. My most interesting takeaway from this project would be realizing the areas that we found were heavily impacted by slowdowns were primarily around shopping centers and stores.”
WeGo administrators said the project provided a visual representation of a particular problem and hopefully that can lead to solutions.
“The big takeaway from the project is that with very targeted investments at and around specific intersections, we have the potential to make major improvements to bus travel speeds and reliability,” Freudberg said.
