Liftango - Buses to the people

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Inspiration

People in Lake Macquarie are addicted to driving, can we improve the public transport system to combat this.

What it does

It visualises all the buses running in Newcastle and Lake Macquarie allowing Transportation Providers such as Keolis-Downer to monitor fleets in real time and work out routes/areas that can be better serviced with an on-demand option. In addition, we built a web page for capturing the routes of the future - essentially crowd sourcing future transport needs.

How we built it

Using Transport for NSW open data we combined it with a rich open source data visualisation tool that Uber use and we have successfully put into our own webapp, while having customised it for the Newcastle and Lake Macquarie regions. Overlaying the data on a map and displaying the movements of the buses to show bus movements easily. Also, we built a website that the public use to input their desired future bus routes - once this hits a certain capacity (say 8) then a transportation provider can look to introduce a new route.

Challenges we ran into

Data from TfNSW was not in the ideal format for the deck.gl webapp tool. Additionanlly, the OSM layer for Newcastle/Lake Macquarie does not contain building heights unlike much of the worlds cities. We used a javascript tool to implement future building heights.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The real time analysis of the buses shown on a local map in 3D. Getting the data to align with the right format proved tricky and took some finesse. In addition, the turnaround time for this solution is something we are proud of.

What we learned

Transport for NSW open data is very rich, however, comes with a number of delicate methods and intricacies before it can be suitable for compatibility with our data visualisation webapp.

What's next for Liftango - Buses to the people

We hope to demo this solution to local transportation providers, in the hope they will decide to use these expertise. Additionally, we can expand on this solution incorporating further open data sets and analysing the data to a higher degree.

Built With

• canva
• csv-parsing
• deck.gl
• gtfs
• phenomic
• react
• tfnsw-api