I’ve committed myself to getting something ready in time for Artomatic, and that probably means that my GTFS explorations will be delayed for a bit. It’s probably for the best, given the timing of the iPhone 3 SDK.
On the other hand, the folks who run the Chinatown bus frown on the use of soldering irons while in transit, so I did spend a little time writing scripts to chew through the dataset. At this point I have 85,921 CSV files delineating exactly where each bus or train is supposed to be on a second-by-second basis during a typical weekday. Well, alright, not exactly: when a unit is between two stops I just interpolate its position linearly — “as the crow flies”, in other words. Still, sort of neat. Fun fact: under the current schedule, the last trip of weekday Metro service concludes on exactly the 100,000th second of the day (which is actually part of the next day, but the trip started before midnight).
Anyway, by counting the lines in each file, I was able to generate the following graph. It shows pretty much what you’d expect: there are a hell of a lot of active trips during rush hour. Still, it feels good to have wrangled with a dataset of this size and produced an actual image from it. Also: there must be well over a thousand Metro and Metrobus operators out there! It explains a few things: given those numbers, you can see how it’s essentially a statistical certainty that on any given day one of them will punch someone in a mascot costume.
in re my most often wanted VCS feature: the ability to use exclamation points in command line commit comments without escaping them:
coelacanth ~ 01:26:51 $ svn commit -m “this is the commit message!”
bash: !”: event not found
coelacanth ~ 01:27:17 $ svn commit -m ‘this is the commit message!’
svn: ‘/home/wolfson’ is not a working copy
That is, it’s a shell, not VCS, feature.
True, and I knew that even as I made the joke (I acknowledged as much in a subsequent @ reply). But that’s not to say that I’m anything other than woefully ignorant when it comes to bash — for instance, I had no idea that exclamation points didn’t require escaping when included in single-quoted strings. Thanks!
That looks a lot like the traditional airline planes in the air pattern as well. There’s the morning push, then a mid-day lull followed by the afternoon push, and not much traffic in the low numbered hours except for some red-eyes and overnight freight flights. (I analyzed a whole pile of ASD some years back.)