Most transit networks have a schematic map showing their stops and services.
The schematics may be annotated with icons to show facilities such as step-free access, toilets or parking, or coloured lines to show service frequencies or engineering works.
These are often manually maintained by graphic designers, which adds cost and lead-time, and in practice may limit the number of variants used.
Our data driven maps solution brings these schematics to life by allowing stop icons and line colours to be dynamically updated based on spreadsheet data.
This not only simplifies the production of schematics for public use, it makes it feasible to use schematics for internal reporting and project use. For example, dashboards can show punctuality, customer satisfaction or reliability by colour coding the schematic. Projects can share implementation status by colour coding stop icons.
How does it work?
We take your existing network schematic, and convert it into a structure data format. This is the one off bit of hard work that then allows the schematics to be data driven.
We map the various stop icons to the stop codes/names that you use to refer to them.
For lines, we build a hierarchy of line segments, mapping these to the route numbers/names that you use (allowing for the fact that many operators have multiple route naming structures in place).
Then it's over to you!
We provide you with access to a web portal where you can upload the stop and/or route data, and generate a schematic in seconds.
Schematics are generated as high resolution vector images (SVG) which can be scaled flexibly for onscreen or print use.
Power users
From our experience with real users, we've also developed a number of power user features:
- Bulk maps - upload a spreadsheet with multiple columns (for example: punctuality, reliability, satisfaction, revenue, etc), and the system will generate a zip file currently multiple schematics, one for each column. Helpful for that periodic reporting.
- Tableau embedding (Beta) - schematics can be embedded into Tableau dashboards, and dynamically update as users select reporting criteria in Tableau.
- Custom stop labels - you can replace or annotate the stop labels, for example to show passenger numbers at each stop.
- Bespoke 'decoration' - many schematics use custom overlays from time to time, for example to show fare zones, connections with events/attractions, or simply route names. We can build these decorations into the product which can be turned on/off as required.