Update on Project Activities As we focus more on transit access to Caltrain stations, emphasis has been placed on determining the accessibility to bus service in Communities of Concern. Quarter-mile buffers--which serve as an ideal walking distance to a transit route--have been drawn out for each SamTrans, MUNI, and VTA route and compared with overlapping Communities of Concern. Areas of CoCs (or entire CoCs) not within this quarter-mile buffer will be observed and analyzed by the team in conjunction with the schedule analysis being completed. Our goal this week was to start developing portions of the final report that were independent of the mapping analysis, such as the Literature Review. The plan was originally to have a completed rough draft of this Lit Review as well as an executive outline for the rest of the paper. However, due to an increased workload from other classes and jobs, the Lit Review is still in outline form and hasn’t been synthesized yet into a complete piece of writing. Despite this setback, we are still ahead of set timetable for this report, and aim to complete the rough draft of the Lit Review within the next couple of days. The rest of the document, in the meantime, has been growing via an executive outline and should soon be a complete map of our written report. Our goal is to finish our scheduling analysis over the weekend. We have been able to generate transfer times for one specific Samtrans Caltrain Connector as a proof-of-concept, so after we generalize our code to apply to the entire list of Samtrans Caltrain Connector arrival times we will be able to get the data we need for all of them relatively simply. Once we have this data, we will attach it to the existing geographical data we have, which will allow us to visualize which specific Caltrain Connectors have the longest delay times and how these overlap with Communities of Concern. Working with our own data will allow us to expand the scope of the Grand Jury report analysis in a geographic way that leads us to further recommendations. What We Observed and Learned This week’s lectures were particularly useful for our project as they dealt with transportation. Listening to our guides from Stanford Transportation, for instance, shed light on the challenges that are associated with running even a small form of local public transit. Keeping these challenges in mind when making relevant and feasible recommendations from our analysis is crucial - we recognize now the intricacies of making changes to established schedules and the constraints and challenges that are associated with each change. We wrote a set of functions in Python to generate transfer times for all Samtrans Caltrain Connector bus routes giving us a quantitative way to work with early arrivals and delays that were described in the Grand Jury report. It is clear that SamTrans schedules must be redesigned to make Caltrain more accessible for those needing to use other transit systems to reach them, as the original report found. Attached is a screenshot of what we found for the SamTrans that ends at the Redwood City Lane A station. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward
After we finish generalizing our code to generate transfer time statistics on per bus-route level, we will export this data and use it to design our final maps. As mentioned earlier, producing our own data allows us to scale up the analysis in the Grand Jury recommendations and to take advantage of the geographic nature of our data and of the project. Although we had planned to have a set of draft recommendations by this point in our project, pivoting at this point means that we have pushed back this timeline until later this week. We are confident based on the significant technical progress made this week, in combination with our accumulated knowledge of the GIS software, that we are on track to have our deliverables in order. Comments are closed.
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