Analyzing STOPS results through the lens of Infographics
Corresponding Author: Amar Sarvepalli, WSP
Presented By: Amar Sarvepalli, WSP
Abstract
Simplified Trips on Project Software (STOPS) applications to analyze and evaluate fixed guideway projects has become a widely accepted practice by project sponsors. The STOPS application produces numerous reports covering existing, no-build, and build alternatives for each of the existing, opening, 10 year and 20 year horizon years. These report files contain extremely valuable data that assists in selecting an alternative. However, the application output is a large text file which contains all the information about the model run including input data, calibration summaries and outputs in a tabular format. Most of the analysts end up using only a portion of this report as it is time consuming to export, clean and process all of the tables efficiently.
This presentation focuses on our use of open software and graphic visual representations of information (infographics) intended to present information quickly and clearly that makes the analyst job easier. One of the main outputs from STOPS is station level trip analysis. We will show how this information can be easily presented in a scalable vector graphic (SVG) format where the analyst can overlay Google Maps or Open Street Map (OSM) data to interactively display station locations and effectively perform station level analysis.
This presentation is based on STOPS applications and analysis of results from San Diego, Indianapolis, Lexington and Virginia Beach where we will show examples like visual district to district flows to make information useable and quickly reproducible. We will highlight the various ways the graphic data can be used to present to citizens and elected officials or interactive uses in HTML promoting highly portable information. Additionally, the presentation covers trending infographic software such as R, leaflet, D3.js as a way to provide powerful and easy way to display travel demand outputs.