Competition 2016: Shortlisted in the category Journalistic

Haltestelle

Tagesspiegel, 2016
Area Mobility Planning Medium Information Visualization Type Journalistic

Why is the bus always late? Starting from an individual judgement, the programmer Ekkehard Petzold started collecting data from the public transport systems for a university project. We joined forces and combined his informatic approach with one deep jorunalistic investigation: How makes the bus, tube and tram plans in the first place? Why are the planners constantly failing in achieving punctual departures? And how can it be explained that in our data observations we especially found a few lines that arrive too early, making it even more difficult to catch the bus or the tram, especially at night?
Combining webscraping, journalistic research and accessible vizualisation techniques, we tried to bridge the world of cold mathematical facts of transport planners and the everyday-life of average people, creating a story where the transport authorities dashboard meets the exhausted passenger after work.

Links

Authors

  • Lehmann, Hendrik Tagesspiegel
  • Jacobs, Stefan Tagesspiegel
  • Petzold, Ekkehard Urban Complexity Lab, FH Potsdam