Muni’s 8.1 mph average, visualized
I’m in charge again, but just for today. I think even if Eugenia were around, though, she’d recognize the beauty and value of Eric Fischer’s info-graphic here. Take it away, Eric:
The colors are the same as in the Month of Muni map but the effect is very different. Except on the cable lines, which are genuinely slow, you can see here that the Muni vehicles move quickly when moving but have their average speed slowed by spending a lot of time stopped.
The difference is that instead of drawing a line from each sampled location to the next in a color corresponding to the average speed across the whole distance, this one plots only the sampled points themselves, with the instantaneous speed the vehicle was moving at the moment it crossed that point. The unfortunate part is that you can hardly see the subway because the reporting there doesn’t interpolate nearly as many points as you get for vehicles on the surface. But on the surface you can see the slowdown at every corner. The plotting gets fuzzy in the Financial District because of noise in the GPS signal from the tall buildings.
Black is stopped (less than 3 mph). Red is slow (3-5 mph). Blue is overall average operating speed (5-9 mph). Yellow is fast service (9-19 mph). Green is rapid movement (faster than 19 mph). Data from NextBus, April 13-June 6, 2010.
See a larger version of the graphic here. Information is beautiful, what?
