Central Transportation and Planning Staff at the Boston Metropolitan Planning Organization
Every MPO in the US is being required by the Federal Government to define performance metrics and goals for their transportation system, and track progress with respect to those goals over time. This repository holds every commit of the Boston MPO dashboard from July 2016 to its final release(d3.easeElasticInOut) in January 2018. The dashboard is live here.
Beatrice Jin is the primarily developer in this project. The raw datasets come from various groups at the Central Transportation Planning Staff, but the code is almost entirely developed by her (which will be more apparent when you see how messy it is). The commit as of today is of state of the dashboard presented at this afternoon's brown bag. People are mostly happy about it, I think, although some of the excitement must be accredited to the aesthetic.
This is a pretty useless README file - mostly I just wanted somewhere to put my thoughts about this project, minus the profanities.
Working for the government "public sector" transportation planning or whatever is not something I had ever dreamt about doing, or something that I would tell my kids to dream about doing. Nonetheless, I've found myself in Central Square's Clover Food Lab at 3 AM, deliriously excited to discover that fill-opacity is different from opacity. And grumbling about the pavement condition as I put our 2.88% of bike-facility-equipped centerline miles to good use. And waking up in our non-air-conditioned Airbnb room absolutely sopping in sweat, mumbling about using the wrong bridge IDs, only to stumble 6 miles from Watertown to Boston to read about TOPOJSON simplification and quantification.
It freaks me out, actually, a little bit. Doing something meaningful in a way that I enjoy is something that doesn't ever quite happen in college. Each day this summer has felt like two, in which I would wake up and enter a coding trance, then wake up again so that I could be a person to the people I loved before slipping back to the nits of tickSize() and tickPadding(). In another way, this summer has also felt like one very long day, where waking up just felt like waking up from waking up from waking up, and the next 20 hours would be the same as the last, splicing PSI data the wrong way, trying to convert time stamps into Date objects, apples and Arizona tea in between.
The person that I want to be was never someone who could picture AM/PM congestion in all of the express highways, and certainly not someone who agonized over how to visually talk about it. It turns out that I've become that person anyway - the weirdo who wonders if the sensation of touch can be translated into a JSON array every time she hugs her friends.
I am very grateful to have worked here, and to be continuing to work here. Boston is the first city I've grown to feel comfortable enough to love. People have been so kind, to a jarring extent; the river is so beautiful; crossing the Mass Ave. bridge still takes my breath; the coffee is too expensive; I wish the busses didn't keep skipping my stop. I've learned and cared more than I ever imagined.
TL;DR I have no chill; sleep is furiously, hazardously begging; this is/was/will-be awesome.
- BZJ August 03, 2016