Pulse of Perth

Visualising our public transport journeys

The RAC in Western Australia has been working with the Planning and Transport Research Centre (PATREC) to ‘visualise’ a day in the life of Perth’s public transport system using aggregated and non-identifiable SmartRider data provided by the PTA.

The outputs include animated and interactive visualisations which have been created through an agile, iterative and collaborative project process, and using a range of software tools for custom programming, processing and configuration.

They have created a webpage to host these and share some interesting stats and facts (Pulse of Perth – Visualising our public transport journeys), such as:

·      around 360,000 passenger boardings are made each day

·      around 100,000 passenger boardings are made between 7:00am-9:00am

·      during the busiest hour (7:20am-8:20am) almost 63,000 people board public transport, equivalent to 52,450 carloads of people (based on 1.2 persons/car)

·      the average trip distance is 13km

·      the average trip time is 18.5 minutes

·      more than 920 buses and 45 trains are in service at 8am, carrying around 21,750 onboard passengers

The project has received some great media interest (for example, WA Today).