Explainations

The goal of writing this is twofold: to explain why I built transitdonkey and how it works. Transitdonkey was created because I enjoy riding public transit and use it frequently when traveling or commuting to work and school. In addition, I think public transit is a vital service for residents living in a city because it connects people to jobs, school, services, and events.

There are two factors leading to budget deficits in almost every transit agency in the U.S. and they are remote work and the end of pandemic funding. Both factors are impacting almost every transit agency in the country leading to massive service cuts. This has particular hurt agencies that rely on a majority of fares to fund their operations such as BART. Additionally, the recent increase in fuel prices has added to the pressure that transit agencies are facing. I believe the historic service cuts that BART has announced will hurt many commuters leading to longer travel times, more transfers, and increased costs. Ultimately, the goal of transitdonkey is to model these scenarios and provide a realistic view of their impact on your commute.

Each scenario is modeled by taking all of the modification that would occur if that scenario happened and applying them to the current transit schedule. This includes closing stations and routes as well as changes to a routes schedule such as reducing its frequency or how late it operates. The nature of the modifications leads to varying degress of accuracy. Meaning modification where something is closed are very accurate because the the station or route being closed just has to be removed from the transit router. Changes to route schedules are slightly less accurate because a new schedule has to be created to represent the change in frequency or hours of operation. Therefore, the frequency on these lines that had schedule changes is accurate. However, the arrival and departure are estimates rather than exact times because it is impossible to know the exact arrival and departure for the route until the transit agency actually releases these times. Transit agencies don't normally release exact times until a scenario actually occurs. As a result, the scenarios aren't perfectly exact but are as close to reality as possible.

Thank you for taking the time to read about transitdonkey! Please feel free to email me transitdonkey@gmail.com

Sincerely,

James :) 🚂 🚌 🚃