Bus Strike January 13th 2015

Another day, another major public transport failure. I didn’t think the bus strike was having much of an impact until I got into the office and had a look at the statistics.

Comparison of the number of buses running on the 12th January 2015 (blue) against the 13th (red)
Comparison of the number of buses running on the 12th January 2015 (blue) against the 13th (red)

The graph above shows the number of buses running on the two days using the same horizontal time axis, so 0915 is a quarter past nine on both days. The red graph shows the comparison of how few buses are running. From the data, I can calculate this as about 24%.

Ratio of number of buses running on each day
Ratio of number of buses running on each day

By plotting the ratio of the number of buses running on Tuesday (strike) divided by the number on Monday (no strike), the fall off in numbers from around 4am this morning is visible. From around 7am until 12pm, this levels off at about 24%.

The numbers don’t tell the whole story, though:

12 January 2015 09:00am bus heatmap
12 January 2015 09:00am bus heatmap
BusStrike_20150113_strikemap_blue
13 January 2015 09:00am bus strike heatmap using the same blue colour scale as the normal day’s map

It looks as though there are more buses in London than in the suburbs, but it’s not showing the huge gaps we saw during the May 2012 strike which were caused by only selected unions striking.

Both these maps are online on MapTube at the following link:

http://www.maptube.org/map.aspx?s=DBDFGlF5TLCgQmUcE0fAqVwcCoAMChAME0jAoFwcCoAMChZt
 

 

3 Replies to “Bus Strike January 13th 2015”

  1. The projection is fine, but the bus positions are approximations based on straight line interpolation between bus stops. It’s most obvious where buses cross rivers and miss the bridges. Also, some of the buses are actually river boats because the data is on the same TfL Countdown system, so they should be in the river.
    I’ve also just changed the colour scale of the strike day heatmap to blue as the original red/yellow version was horrible.

  2. Actually, I think it’s to do with the heatmap visualisation, not the projection. The positions of the heatmap centres seem to be slightly out with respect to the bus positions, but it’s not a consistent error. The bus positions are using lat/lon coordinates, so reprojection into Mercator is easy. I’ll have to look into it a bit further, but that seems to be why the buses aren’t following the roads in places. You can’t see it unless you’re zoomed into an individual bus though, which is probably why it hasn’t been picked up before.

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