The Global Bus Race

The Urban Data Challenge invited developers to create visualisations of transport data for San Francisco, Geneva, and Zurich. We looked at three Google Maps API visualisations created for the challenge back in April.

OpenStreetMap was another popular mapping API used by developers during the challenge. Of those maps created with OpenStreetMap, Urban Bus Races is a particularly interesting visualisation. Using actual transit data from San Francisco, Zurich and Geneva, Urban Bus Races measures and compares bus route performance in the three cities.

Users can choose from a selection of routes in each city and then view a mapped race of the buses on three separate maps. Users can set the date and time for their bus race and Urban Bus Races will show the location of buses operating on the routes selected, during the date and hour selected. The size of the grey circles along the routes represent the number of passengers waiting at each stop.

The winning route in each bus race is awarded to the route with the highest Overall Route Performance at the end of the race.