Open Seats
Research for a real-time city
Open Seats is a project that fellow researcher Darshan Santani and I spearheaded in the pursuit of improving future urban mobility. It came out of the larger LIVE Singapore! research initiative, launched by MIT’s Senseable City Lab and the SMART Centre in Singapore. I participated on LIVE Singapore! as a visiting researcher for nine months. The lab had built a real-time data platform, and shared data agreements from a substantial array of Singaporean utilities and transit agencies served to seed the project’s aim of creating a useful data ecosystem for Singaporean citizens and the academic community.
Addressing the overcrowded bus pain point
Open Seats’ primary mission was to alleviate the periodic overcrowding among individual buses. Nearly 4 million Singaporeans rely on the bus system for their everyday commute, as such every bottleneck in the system is amplified by the sheer volume of users. The LIVE Singapore! platform provides real-time bus ridership data across the entire network. With that, we could visualize the locations and amount of open seats available for any bus.
Open Seats: the mobile app
A mobile app is in line with the idea of a self-regulating system. Riders have the tool they need to see a bright red circle (meaning: bus is full!) and know to avoid that bus when they are planning their trip. This should make the system itself run into fewer bottlenecks. Because this app was conceived specifically for Singaporean travelers and we have the dataset, I decided to integrate local weather station information. A sudden downpour (a common occurrence) can also change the calculus of what trip one chooses, a shorter walk outside becomes more important.
Open Seats: the interactive data visualization
This tool provides a city-level view of real-time bus capacities. It carries more value for academic research and central actors, as the data is still partially abstracted and the activity of any moment can be paused and compared with the statistical average. The outliers start to emerge; bus routes with consistently high or low volume of course, but also the rates at which a particular route bottlenecks and a bus becomes extremely overcrowded. This often occurs as a result of ‘bus bunching,’ the lead bus is packed (a red circle) and the trailing bus right behind is delayed but also unnecessarily empty (blue).
