Going for Gold in Tokyo with Conveyal Analysis
Hosting the Olympics is a major challenge for public transportation agencies. Though front-line operations are on the world stage during the Games, visitors also need effective information provision and journey planning tools for months or years beforehand. Most Tokyo 2020 spectators, for example, will know the venues they want to visit, but they may need help understanding how public transportation connects those venues to hotels and other attractions in the region.
At Conveyal, we develop software to help people understand how transit connects places. While we initially created Conveyal Analysis to help planners evaluate scenarios in technical settings, we have also added the ability to publish shareable, interactive accessibility sites. These interactive sites are designed to help the public understand travel times and access to opportunities in different scenarios. The latest version of Conveyal Analysis reduces turnaround time to import baseline data, edit scenarios, and publish shareable sites for any region, and we were excited to try these features in a new context.
When the Open Data Challenge for Public Transportation in Tokyo was announced, as a demonstration of how open data could benefit Olympics spectators, we decided to submit an interactive accessibility site. Open data for transit are at the heart of Conveyal’s work, so we were excited to help promote it in Japan. Plus, this is probably the closest we’ll ever get to competing in the summer Olympics!
Turning Open Data into an Interactive Accessibility Site
The various private operating companies and railways serving Tokyo are accustomed to selling schedule data to publishers, who then aggregate them into timetable books. While such books are helpful for planning the details of specific trips, they aren’t especially user-friendly for visitors who just want a high-level view of how places are connected — or how they will be connected two years from now. The open data challenge made schedule and network data for multiple operators available through a single API, opening possibilities to provide information to visitors in totally different ways than traditional timetable books.
Our site uses these newly opened transit data to show transport connections in an integrated way, without displaying complicated details of exact timetables. The site helps people understand all the places they can reach by public transport from a selected start point.
We include Olympics venues as suggested start points, but users can choose any start point in the region, then see how far they can travel in an adjustable amount of time. The site also shows how many destinations of a chosen type (in this example, hotel beds) can be reached within that time. If users select an end point, they can see example routes of how to travel from their selected start to that end.
Users can also compare travel times and accessibility in the 2018 and 2020 multimodal transport networks. To represent the 2018 baseline, we combined data from the competition with open data from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport’s GIS Download Service. We estimated timetables for operators that did not release timetable data through the open data challenge, so some results aren’t especially accurate in our proof-of-concept submission. We represented the 2020 network (including new BRT lines and a new station on the Yamanote Line, planned to open in time for the Olympics) using Conveyal Analysis. Simple configuration allows the interactive site to be re-published with ease to reflect other planned infrastructure or newly released data.
On the Medal Podium
At the awards ceremony in May, Conveyal was announced as the winner of an Excellence Award! In his review, the Chair of the Association for Open Data of Public Transportation, Ken Sakamura, offered this assessment:
“Conveyal TAUI: Tokyo ODPT” is a website to support access to accommodations and sports arenas, which will be a challenge faced by foreign tourists to Tokyo in 2020. It has a high degree of technical perfection, and it is notable that such a work was submitted from an overseas applicant.
As the only non-Japanese awardees, we were honored to receive this prize and inspired to see the range of other competitors’ creative uses of open data. Another judge remarked,
All the submitted works, including the prize winners, were excellent, with such interesting innovations as methods of connecting data across the border of different public transportation operators… and concepts that consider public transportation not only as a means of transit, but something that creates added value through its connections with other parts of daily life. Above all, I was deeply moved that so many people were interested in public transportation open data, including our company’s, and sought to improve public transportation through innovative use of open data.
— Kenichi Matsuhashi, Information Systems Planning Department Manager of JR-East
We share this excitement about continued innovation with open data for public transportation and thank the organizers and sponsors for the opportunity to participate.
More Information
Conveyal has produced interactive accessibility sites for open houses about long-range transportation plans (e.g. MassDOT’s Ideas of March) and other public engagement efforts. We will share more about why we believe such sites are well-suited for public engagement in the next post of this series. A third post will outline the technical details of how we publish these sites.
If you’re interested in publishing an interactive accessibility site to help stakeholders understand different transit scenarios in your region, whether for new Olympics infrastructure or a redesigned bus network, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
