Visualizing Delays – Andrea Giambelli

Visualizing Delays

On Toronto’s TTC subway network

In the early stages of my graduate thesis research at York University I focused on issues of public transportation in Toronto, and I wanted to work on a more detailed take on the topic of transit delays, which I had already investigated in a previous academic project.

This interactive series visualizes all subway delays happened between January and March 2018 from the spatial, chronological and quantitative perspective, through different visual models such as maps, bar charts, unit charts, linear and radial timelines. Readers can filter and sort the data, and access details on demand by hovering over the visual elements.

Watch a video of the interactive applications below!

Visualizing Delays

On Toronto’s TTC subway network

Watch a video of the interactive applications below!

The interactive visualizations

Distorting the TTC’s classic network map to depict the total minutes of delay occurring at each station.

Visualizing all stations arranged by number of delay events. The interactive application allows to rearrange the graph by train line and ridership.

Drawing all delay events as spikes arranged by time of occurrence around a 24-hour clock. Delay minutes for the event determine each spike’s length.

Similar to the previous visualization, but featuring stations arranged by total number of delay minutes. Each dot represents one hour.

Plotting all events arranged by station (horizontal axis) and time of occurrence (vertical axis) generates a matrix which portrays interesting periodic patterns within the data. Each dot represents one event, and its area is proportional to the corresponding number of minutes.

Visualizing Delays
Year: 2018
Project type: academic – Graduate Thesis project (early explorations)
Specs: series of interactive visualizations developed using the Processing programming language
Data: TTC Subway delays
Code: coming soon!