The Visualisation of the Public Transport System of Sydney

SUMMARY The Sydney metropolitan area has the largest public transport system in Australia with over one million commuters using the CityRail network each day. Despite Sydney having one of the fastest growing population’s in Australia, public transport usage is only slightly growing in Sydney compared to other major centres throughout Australia. The lack of growth in public transport patronage reflects the shortage in the delivery of public transport infrastructure projects within the Sydney metropolitan area. It is essential for the growth of Sydney that a sustainable, modern and cost effective transport system be established to cope with current transport patronage and to support future growth. This paper assesses Sydney’s current public transport system (including trains, buses and ferries), the strategic plans in place to cope with growth and a method for visualising these systems to provide an analytical view of the transport system. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate a visualisation tool that is able to identify and highlight the problem areas within the transport system and offer input to test the capability of the proposed strategic plans for Sydney. This analysis has the ability to help improve Sydney’s public transport for current and future residents. The creation of the visualisation will use a dataset from a typical working day to identify the position of buses, trains and ferries within the Sydney public transport network. The visualisation will classify the different modes of transport and enable the analysis of these transit modes both individually and interacting together. The dataset of all of the public transport modes over Sydney for the typical day comprises of 1.3 million data entries. This paper will not only discuss methods deal with the large amounts of data but also look into the best methods to deal with data conversion, manipulation, analysis and presentation.