Metropolitan Transportation Commission
Clipper Business Intelligence and Reporting/Vital Signs
The San Francisco Bay Area offers the Clipper card to transit riders for seamless travel using the services of more than 22 transit providers. TransSIGHT is responsible for gathering data from the Clipper back-office system and preparing weekly and monthly reports for MTC and the transit operators. The goal of the project is to publish easy-to-understand reports
Working with MTC, TranSIGHT delivered a multidisciplinary project to design and developed an interactive website and outreach tool for MTC. The site is a collection of stories and interactive data tools documenting how the Bay Area is growing and changing through the lens of transportation, land use, the economy, the environment, and equity. The site is designed to strike the right balance between constituents (lay public users who want to learn more about what’s happening in their community and how their city compares to others) and more technical planners/users (those who can use the wealth of interactive data tools to help plan for the future of their local municipality).
Key Challenges
Representing information of 22+ Transit Operators in a single view: It was challenging to put a single view together. TransSIGHT worked closely with MTC to identify the key themes that the data users desired to utilize and were quickly able to view applicable data for their own agency. Over time, reports were tuned to better meet user’s needs.
Educating report consumers: Identifying data that will be public: It was critical to educate the users that transit system data is not static: depending on the device pooling and connectivity to the hub, data uploads may lag the reporting time period. For example, a report that showed 10,000 ridership yesterday, may show 10,500 ridership for the same period, as offline vehicles were connected and their data added to the data lake.
