For MBTA riders who’ve ever wondered what daily train traffic speed looks like (a.k.a when a Red Line train typically gets delayed), well, prepare to be put in a trance by this Boston Twitter software engineer’s creation.
A week in the life of the #mbta – what else do you want to want to see? http://t.co/h1lS1R89FO pic.twitter.com/11ornmGQRK
— Mike Barry (@msb5014) March 26, 2014
Mike Barry, @msb5014, posted this tweet Wednesday morning. The picture he included looks like a screenshot from his real-time MBTA traffic time-lapse of one week’s worth of Red, Orange, and Blue Line traffic – “O2/03 to 02/09.” If you’ve taken a good look at the image and watched the video but still can’t quite figure out what you’re looking at, think of it like Google Maps traffic updates. I’d tried to explain, but Barry and @BostonUrbEx (A.P Blake) already discussed it:
@msb5014 What am I looking at? Green: service. Yellow: minor delays. Red: moderate/severe delays. ?
— A.P. Blake ? (@BostonUrbEx) March 26, 2014
@BostonUrbEx yes, that’s right. Gray=no service Green=75% normal speed orange=50-75% red=25-50% dark red <25%
— Mike Barry (@msb5014) March 26, 2014
@msb5014 Did you create this? Also, realtime is only showing the dots at end of lines for me?
— A.P. Blake ? (@BostonUrbEx) March 26, 2014
@msb5014 Looks pretty cool to me! Just wish I could see the real-time.
— A.P. Blake ? (@BostonUrbEx) March 26, 2014
@msb5014 Oh. Yep. I’m on a Veterans Administration computer at this time.
— A.P. Blake ? (@BostonUrbEx) March 26, 2014
@BostonUrbEx we have historic turnstile data too
— Mike Barry (@msb5014) March 26, 2014
Well, that ending is a little bit of a tease, sir.
I reached out to Barry on Twitter, even tried connecting with him on LinkedIn. He hasn’t gotten back to me yet. So, Mike, if you’re reading this story, you already know: The house has been boarded up. The doors. The windows. Everything. We’re at the Comfort Inn, room 112. But, seriously, let’s see some more MBTA data. I think people would be pretty curious.
On Twitter, Barry says he’s a software engineer at Boston Twitter, according to his Twitter profile, um, on Twitter.