Hello World!

This is the first entry in the blog for the SEPTA Stats website.

To give an idea what spawned this, we need to go back in time a few months. There was a train on SEPTA’s Regional Rail system that I took home every night, but it never seemed to be on time. What’s worse, is that as I was checking the status page on SEPTA’s website, it seemed to get later and later. I began to go through the possibilities in my head — did the train keep getting stuck at a particular station? Was the delay slowly accumulating from station to station?

A little of Column A, a little of Column B…

This prompted me to set up a Splunk instance and start gathering data from SEPTA’s train API:

SEPTA API

From there, I started running more queries to see what else I could do with the data. For example, what are the Top 10 late trains right now?

“Today was a good day…”

Or maybe the overall system lateness over 7 days?

I’d say, “Didn’t even have to use my AK…”, but that would be inappropriate.

What comes next? Now I have the site up at http://www.SeptaStats.com/ and the source code (and bug tracking) is up at https://github.com/dmuth/SeptaStats, my next step will be continuing development and try to come up with more interesting train and station reports.

Long-term, I’m hoping to be able to spot trends in the Regional Rail system, such as trains which are chronically late (candidates for rescheduling?) or ”ripple effects” that happen when a single train is delayed due to exception circumstances. (such as police activity)

Wanna help? Drop me an email or leave a comment here!

Visit the site: http://www.SeptaStats.com/