SEPTA

April 29th, 2020May 2nd, 2020

Philadelphia Public Transit vs COVID-19

We’re well past a month into the COVID-19 shutdown, and I noticed that fewer and fewer trains were running on Regional Rail each day. I knew that SEPTA had decreased their service due to less riders, but I wondered just how strict the service cuts were. I also wondered if more or perhaps less trains were running on time.

Fortunately, I have several years worth of train data due to running SeptaStats.com, so I could answer these questions myself!

I started off by firing up Splunk Lab then went for a walk while it took 15 minutes or so to load the data up. I came back, and decided to see where we were:

That’s well north of 60 million data points. While I could crunch that data as-is, it would take longer for me to run my subsequent queries as well as look for trends in the data. I ended up writing a couple of scripts to summarize that data on a daily basis, so that I can get a bucketed breakdown of late trains for the entire day. We’ll get back to that bucketing later, because I first want to talk about train volumes.

I figured that with the perceived dropoff in service, I could look at how many distinct trains (identified by train number) each day. Sure enough, there was a drop off in train service levels:

“Symmetrical book stacking… just like the Philadelphia mass turbulence of 1947!”

Things started to get serious the week of Monday, March 16th. In fact, that was the last day of “normal” service on Regional Rail. Starting on Tuesday the 17th, the number of trains per weekday went from nearly 500 to about 362, with the weekends unaffected.

December 15th, 2019December 16th, 2019

“Hey Siri! Is SEPTA F*cked?”

I’m happy to announce that I’ve created shortcuts in IOS so that Siri can now tell you if SEPTA is fucked!

Before you can get started, you will need to configure IOS to allow Untrusted Shortcuts. There are more detailed instructions on Apple’s support website, but it comes down to doing these two things:

Go into Settings > Shortcuts
Turn on the setting that says “Allow Untrusted Shortcuts”.

If you don’t see the setting mentioned in Step 2), you will need to open the Shortcuts app, run at least one shortcut, and come back to that screen. (Thanks, Apple!)

If you need further help allowing Untrusted Shortcuts, this writeup is more thorough and includes screenshots.

Anyway, once you have enabled Untrusted Shortcuts, you can click on any of these links to add shortcuts to Siri that will query the website’s API and report back on the status of Regional Rail, Busses, or both:

Once a Shortcut is loaded, you can run the shortcut by either tapping on the Shortcut in the Shortscuts app, or simply by asking Siri the question mentioned above.

Feel free to try this out, and let me know in the comments how it works for you!

Special thanks to @RadioColin over on Twitter for the initial draft of the shortcut!

November 18th, 2017July 20th, 2019

Examining 12 Months of SEPTA API Queries

With the release of SEPTA’s new app, I’ve suddenly been flooded with questions about their API. People wanted to know how stable it was.

Well, I don’t work for SEPTA, which means I don’t have insight into their operations, but I can perform some analytics based on what I have, which is approximately 18 months of Regional Rail train data, read every minute by SEPTA Stats.

Overall Stats

This is all of the data that I have in Septa Stats currently:

Events Since Inception: 26,924,887 events
First Event: Mar 1, 2016 12:00:01 AM
Last Event: Nov 16, 2017 10:33:53 PM

That’s way more events than minutes in that timeframe, and the reason for that is each API query is split into a separate event for each train. So if an API call returns status for 20 trains, that gets split into 20 different events. This is done because Splunk has a much easier time working with JSON that isn’t a giant array. 🙂

July 17th, 2016March 16th, 2019

Found Buggy Train Data In SEPTA’s API

While waiting for a train at Ardmore station yesterday, I decided to check it out on SEPTA Stats to see just how late it was, and where it was. This is what I saw:

Well… that can’t be right. It’s an inbound train, and I had been standing at Ardmore station for the last 10 minutes. No trains came through in that time. What’s going on?

April 5th, 2016March 16th, 2019

Introducing the SEPTA Regional Rail System Dashboard!

…and 2 new API endpionts, too. But more on those later.

I’m proud to say that there is now a dashboard for the entire Regional Rail system. It is present on both the front page and the “SEPTA System Stats” page:

This new dashboard makes it straightforward to determine the status of the entire Regional Rail system at a glance.

April 4th, 2016March 16th, 2019

Train Line Dashboards Now Available

On the heels of yesterday’s post, I’ve introduced dashboards for train lines.

The dashboard will provide a snapshot of the current status of the line, namely the number of trains, average lateness, and how many trains are over 5 minutes late.

April 3rd, 2016March 16th, 2019

Train Dashboards Now Available

I’m pleased to announce that dashboards are now available on train views.

Prior to the introduction of the dashboard, it was difficult to tell if a train was running, what route it was on, and what station it was at. This new dashboard makes use of the “latest” API endpoint described in the previous post to provide a snapshot of the current status of the train.