Bart has a reasonable API, and it has a bunch of interesting stuff. I also wanted to try out Julia, so I figured this could be a fun project. One of their end points is called Station Schedule and it gives you a list of all trains that run through that station.
My ultimate goal is to track those fancy new cars, and align my commute with them. For that, this endpoint seemed promising.
As a start to play around with this data I decided to graph the load of a train leaving a station. This is the result!
plot_trains_for_station("MONT")
That makes sense because that's a big hub for commuters, and they would be leaving Montgomery after work.
plot_trains_for_station("EMBR")
The load there is bigger during the same rush hours as above, but we also see morning commuters leaving Embarcadero.
This may be folks heading south to commute into the Mission?
plot_trains_for_station("WOAK")
This really shows how big a transportation hub Wesk Oakland is. You have morning commuters getting into the city, and evening commuters going north to the 'burbs.
plot_trains_for_station("EMBR")
plot_trains_for_station("MONT")
plot_trains_for_station("Powl")
plot_trains_for_station("Civc")
plot_trains_for_station("16th")
plot_trains_for_station("24th")
plot_trains_for_station("Glen")
plot_trains_for_station("BALB")
plot_trains_for_station("DALY")