The RTD Service & Ridership Tracker is a project by Greater Denver Transit to track changes in RTD service levels and ridership. It draws data from the following sources:
The root of this repo is a Next.js webapp, but inside the datagen/ directory is Python code to read and aggregate data from the sources mentioned above. That file updates data.json, which is bundled by Next.js into a static site that lives in the docs/ directory. We host that static site on recovery.transitmatters.org.
The computations on the ridership data and the GTFS feeds in particular can be very slow, so we cache intermediate results in the following directories:
datagen/gtfs/.data
datagen/ridership/.data
You can force some computations to re-run by selectively deleting files from these.
To initialize a Python virtual environment and install Python and JavaScript dependencies, run:
make setup-env
Some recent macOS environments will crash while installing NumPy here — if this happens to you, you can try rerunning the command as SYSTEM_VERSION_COMPAT=1 make setup-env per the solution here.
There are more useful commands in both the Makefile and package.json.
The setup process creates a datagen/secrets.py. TransitMatters members have a BOX_ACCESS_TOKEN from a free Box developer account which should be copied into this file. If you don't want to bother with this step, you can read cached ridership data from a specific date in by modifying RIDERSHIP_TARGET_DATE in datagen/config.py:
RIDERSHIP_TARGET_DATE = date(2021, 8, 8)This date must match one of the subdirectories in datagen/ridership/.data, e.g. 20210808.
To run the webapp locally with the data present in data.json, run:
npm run dev
To rebuild data.json with the latest data, run:
make update-data
To build a production version of the site in docs/, run:
npm run build-static
To update data.json, rebuild the production site, and make a Git commit of the changes, run:
npm run update
This is what we use to periodically update the production site.
If you've found this app helpful or interesting, please consider joining Greater Denver Transit to help support our mission to advocate for an efficient, reliable, safe, accessible and inclusive public transit system which delivers on the region’s mobility needs.