The MBTA Covid Recovery Dashboard is a project by the TransitMatters Labs team to track changes in MBTA service levels and ridership during the Covid-19 pandemic. It draws data from the following sources:
- The MBTA GTFS feed archive
- Some public data on ridership updated regularly by MassDOT OPMI
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
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 donating to TransitMatters to help support our mission to provide data-driven advocacy for a more reliable, sustainable, and equitable transit system in Metropolitan Boston.