Winners and Honorable Mentions!

Award-Winning Entries

Best Historical Data Analysis & Grand Prize Winner

“Changing Patterns/Life In Boston” by Andy Monat, Andrew Collier & Ari Ofsevit
The grand prize winners provided three submissions in one:
• Interactive Exploration of Late-Night Taxi Patterns
• Late Night MBTA Ridership – Comparison of Changing Use and Cost
• Exploration of Late Night Travel Patterns
The submissions included maps, charts and an interactive graphic. The analyses focused exploring late-night taxi location data, comparing late night T usage to normal weekday use, and analyzing the cost per trip, induced demand, comparison with earlier MBTA “Night Owl”

Best MBTA API App

MBTA Travel Pro by Mitesh Patel
MBTA Travel Pro enables users to track the real-time location and arrival/departure times for various routes mass transit routes in and around Boston. The app allows users to customize their view to quickly display their favorite line and real-time-updated location and wait time for the arrival of their particular travel mode: bus, subway, train, or boat. The application is specifically designed for Windows Phone 8 and above with seamless integration with phone operating system.

Best Historical Data Tool

Late Night T Data Explorer by Matthew Danish
How have usage patterns of the late night MBTA and Taxi services changed between 2013 and 2014? We can explore this question using these three interactive charts, that provide several views of the late night T and Taxi data. Using the interactive charts, users can select different slices of information to be presented. Compare year-over-year differences at various times of night, select a particular weekend day, a set of transit routes, or taxi-trip starting ZIP codes to view.

Comparison is provided of comparable weekends year-over-year, from February 28th up to early June, to provide a glimpse of the change before and after the initiation of late night service on March 28th.

Honorable Mentions:

FuzzMap

Project
A real-time view of the entire region and live-updating locations on transit vehicles

Booz Allen Hamilton

Project
Interesting analysis of ridership and cost

MBTA Next Train

Project
The first MBTA travel info smartwatch app (and perhaps the first mass-transit smartwatch app in the nation!)

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Overview

MassDOT and the MBTA are excited to announce a 12-week data challenge that will release the MBTA's late night ridership data as well as a new version of the API for the T's real-time data.

Purpose

The goals of the challenge will be to highlight the MBTA’s late night service as well as see how it and other on-demand services such as Uber are contributing to Boston's culture shift towards later hours. The City of Boston is exploring how to offer more amenities later into the night to make itself a more attractive destination for people to live and work; one that is not restricted by traditional hours of operation. MassDOT and the MBTA want to know how late night service is changing the way people think about accessing and traveling around the city.

On a parallel track, the MBTA has released a new API for real-time information. The new API is an exciting improvement for developers that currently access the MBTA’s real-time data, because the common platform will allow for the visualization of all of our data on all modes side-by-side in one application. The new MBTA-realtime v2 API integrates predictions and alerts together for MBTA subway, commuter rail, and bus in one easy-to-use interface. Check the GitHub site for information on the API's new formats, calls and fields. They make it easier than ever to develop a wide variety of applications using MBTA data. Find out more on the API at the data challenge GitHub site:
https://github.com/MassBigData/LateNightT/

Goals

1. Explore the ways that late-night MBTA service is being used, opening opportunities, and changing the region
2. Promote new apps that use integrated real-time and alert data for MBTA subway, bus, and commuter rail service

Schedule

Friday, June 20th: late-night data and description of new API become available
Tuesday, June 24th: demonstration version of new API available to work with
Wednesday, July 2nd: Meet-up/team building event
Thursday, September 5th: Submission deadline (extended!)

Prize categories

1. Best exploration of late-night ridership
2. Best exploration of the opportunities that late-night service opens up
3. Best app to that uses many different kinds of information published through MBTA-realtime
4. Most original or creative new application to use MBTA-realtime data

Sponsors

MassDOT/MBTA
The Massachusetts Technology Collaborative / Mass Big Data Initiative
Ciy of Boston
hack/reduce
Microsoft
Uber