How Zurich's Transport System is Performing

Animated and interactive infographics visualizing the performance of Zurich's public transportation system.

Context

On a weekly basis Zurich's public transportation organisation VBZ started to publish data sets with the tram and bus departure delays. The detail of the data includes every of their vehicle's departure times, making it a true gold mine for data analysts.

Brief

How to show Zurich's transportation system's performance based on real data? How to visualize the delays of trams and buses on a station-level and offer explorative access for the readers?

Concept

Once the data of multiple months was merged together, we had an interesting insight on which lines and stations have the most departure delays. Even when delays could be detected, as one might expect in a country like Switzerland, they were at a minimum. So showcasing what VBZ is mastering every day seemed to be a fair approach.

To give an impression of what it means to provide about 2k departures per day at Zurich's most frequented junctions, I simulated the traffic based on the official departure times of a Monday morning from 7 to 8 o'clock:

To visualize the delays, I developed an explorable ranking of VBZ' tram and bus lines. Hovering visualizes the delay percentage on a station level (which differs depending on the line's direction):

In the article I also provided a map to focus on searching stations and let the reader learn more about its delay percentage and delay ranking.

Read the full (but unfortunately pretty damaged) article

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