#625 Online: StopWatch - Exploring Bus Service in Chicago

The StopWatch analyzes a unique dataset of over 100 million real-time bus locations collected by Chi Hack Night Ghost Bus. Part of the 2024 Local Data Journalism Initiative, this project is a collaboration between the University of Chicago’s Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and the Chicago Tribune.

The goal of this project is to understand how bus service reliability changed over time in the city of Chicago after the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic and across the city’s community areas. To address our research questions, we built a novel, comprehensive data set showing the actual arrival time of each bus at every bus stop in Chicago from June 2022 to July 2024. In addition, we processed schedule data to compare actual performance to planned service. With this data, we computed several metrics to assess the reliability and accessibility of bus service.

ASL This event will not have an American Sign Language interpreter.