For new The data and analysis team of the Metropolitan Transportation Administration in York City, January 5, 2025, feels a lot like Kismet.
Three and a half years ago, New York State Assemblyman had A law passed MTA is required to release “easy to access, easy to understand and available data” to the public; by January 2022, MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber officially announced the composition of the new team. at the same time, New York City The controversial congestion pricing plan officially kicked off the cars entering Manhattan’s busiest streets in 2019, but officially kicked off in a long process of setting up, in which transportation agencies and state battle lawsuits, politicians and vocal opponents.
So when the program finally started in January, the MTA’s data and analytics team was ready. They can see the moment when the charges start in the spreadsheet. “The day that started, a field changed from ‘revenue-free collection’ to ‘revenue’,” said Andy Kuziemko, vice president of the data and analysis team.
A few days later, the team pumped data from vehicles entering the area in 10-minute increments and posted the data on its website so that New Yorkers themselves could decide whether the congestion plan was really reducing traffic on city streets. The agency has been doing this ever since. You – yes, you – can view and download MTA’s data It’s here.
Online web pages are not flashy, but they represent a rare and comprehensive public transport victory for Open Data advocates, who believe access to good public data sets is crucial to government transparency and efficiency.
Since 2022, MTA’s data and analytics team has grown to 26 full-time employees whose workdays focus on information that once spread throughout the MTA. To be clear, the institution is large. The biggest thing in the country is that it carries about 5.9 million riders every day on subways, buses, commuter rails, as well as tunnels and bridges. There are a lot of numbers to track.
Really a lot; MTA now publishes over 180 datasets. Recent additions include more than just Ten years of data value Time spent by MTA employees on “production tasks” New dataset Bus speeds in Manhattan caused by the subway; The most crowded downtown roads. Kuziemko said there are 30 data sets being publicly available “in the near future.”
Anti-intellectual
In an interview, Kuzimko and MTA’s head of strategic planning Jon Kaufman praised the new culture of data sharing within the program. In 2023, leadership encourages managers across the agency to allow their data to be ingested into the MTA’s “data lake” that can be refined, deprived of identified information, and eventually released publicly. (Some MTAs’ data contain personally identifiable information of commuters; the agency said that that specific data was not released to the public.) The agency has also begun using new in-house software and tools, which has given them technical features they have never had before. “We’ve spent zero-hour consultation time, and that’s something we’re really proud of – we actually built in-house expertise in the public sector,” Kuziemko said. “It’s really cool.”
“It’s rare for government agencies to share this granularity of data,” said Sarah Kaufman, who directs the New York University Rudin Transportation Center. In fact, it’s like the face-to-face MTA, Before 2009, the habit of legally pursuing developers He scraped the system schedule and routed the data to build a rider-friendly app.
