Introducing: MTA Fare Buster

 Dev, My Latest And Greatest Invention  No Responses »
Oct 282014
 

So first off, let me start by saying that I noticed that my last post is entitled NYC Subway Data, Part 4 – moar data!. I later noticed that there is no “Part 3” in this series. There never was. Too bad, it will remain a mystery.

Going forward, I’m happy to introduce MTA Fare Buster!!!

Based on Ben Wellington (iQuantNY)‘s post on the leftover money that you commonly end up with when buying a metrocard, I did some research and despite there being a few similar apps out there on the Android market, one was good but not updated with the latest bonus policy, one doesn’t give you options, and one wasn’t free, so I decided to write my own.

Full source code here: https://github.com/loisaidasam/mta-fare-buster-android

Happy commuting!

NYC Subway Data, Part 4 – moar data!

 Dev, Mondays and Tips  1 Response »
Oct 202014
 

After spending some fun time with the subway schedule data the other night, I’m a bit more curious now about usage.

On the data list I found the following resources:

(could be helpful for finding fare type popularity? dunno how interesting that is…)

Location data, cool! Through the NYC open data site, I even found this cool little map showing the NYC subway entrances (I’m assuming based on this data):

https://nycopendata.socrata.com/Transportation/Subway-Entrances/drex-xx56?

THIS is interesting because hourly turnstile data COULD be helpful for trying to estimate station popularity at a given time of day/day of week/etc. The only problem is that the Remote Unit/Control Area/Station Name Key data doesn’t really matchup with the GTFS dataset Stops identifiers:

Remote Booth Station Data

vs.

GTFS Stops Data

Hopefully more soon…

NYC Subway Data, Part 2

 Dev, Mondays and Tips  No Responses »
Oct 142014
 

A follow up to my last post about trying to make something useful of the NYC subway data provided by the MTA…

I was googling around to try and see if I could find a list of stations per subway line, and didn’t really find any good answers.

I did find this post, essentially asking for the same thing I was looking for:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25634764/scrape-mta-subway-data/26353509#26353509

And decided that I’d lend a hand and help out, so I came up with this:

https://github.com/loisaidasam/sub

(feel free to upvote my answer)

Happy commuting y’all!

NYC Subway Data

 Dev, Mondays and Tips  1 Response »
Oct 142014
 

So I became a commuter today (we moved to Brooklyn on Saturday, yay!), and although it’s only been a short time, I’ve already had a few ideas for apps that might make commuting better.

One such idea will require some data about the NYC Subway System. I debated using pup to scrape the data I want from Wikipedia or something, but then started looking at the vast list of NYC developer resources.

The NYC MTA developer resources are a bit of a mess, so this post serves to help those that find themselves lost.

There are two kinds of data that these guys offer:

1. Realtime feeds

Here’s a list of realtime feeds that they offer (note it’s limited to only a few lines, which I’m sure they’ll expand upon with time): http://datamine.mta.info/list-of-feeds

To use the realtime feeds you’ll need an API key, which you can register for here: http://datamine.mta.info/user/register

2. Static feeds

To get the basic line information, you can go here http://web.mta.info/developers/developer-data-terms.html, read the terms, and click the Yes, I agree to these terms and conditions. link to get access to all the static data (WITHOUT REGISTERING).

A word to the wise, the data is in GTFS format.

Also all of the official colors are here: http://web.mta.info/developers/resources/line_colors.htm

Happy developing