<aside> ❓ Getting your PVD Approved
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^We didn't have to "get our PVD approved". It's misleading to have this link here. The PVD is what you're reading now — a living document that lasts and gets modified through the cohorts. What you will be required to do, though, is write 3 release canvases for approval that will outline how you plan to spend your 8 weeks — ours and Labs 22's are on the left under "Release Canvases".
^This is just a(n overly formal) guideline. Our stakeholder, Jarie, is a cool guy who will speak with you casually. And you won't need to start off from square one when you talk to him, because you have the benefit of learning all about the project from this document.
Link to overview video:
(Yeah it's not here. Never was. Don't know what it is.)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3eh6pr0987qcum0/lambda_sfmuni_video.mp4?dl=0
Joe Citizen rides SFMTA often and is frustrated with the inconsistency in service. He routinely sees multiple buses bunching up at a stop or experiences a large time gap between buses even though the NextBus display says the bus is minutes away. Joe wants to ride the bus but sometimes he has to take a Lyft or Uber because he has to get to an appointment on time.
Joan Smith is a member of an oversight body for the SFMTA. She routinely asks for data about bunches and gaps on the Muni lines. She is repeatedly told that no such data exists and to compile it would take resources the SFMTA does not have. This frustrates her because she hears complaint after complaint from Joe Citizen, as well as experiencing it herself, the bunches and gaps within the Muni bus and rail system.
Mary Muni is a program manager for SFMTA service improvement projects. Her job is to implement services improvements related to the speed of travel, on-time percentage, and crowding reduction to name a few. The data she uses is outdated and hard to come by due to budget and time restrictions. When asked questions about average travel times or the frequency of bunches and gaps by Joan Smith, she cannot answer. This frustrates her because she knows the data would allow her to not only do her job better but also improve the Muni experience for riders on a daily basis.
(prewritten, before Labs 24. This is the problem as it was at the very beginning.)
<aside> 🥺 The SFMTA has no publicly available historical data to determine the travel (both actual and average) times on muni bus and rail lines. (Edit: yes they do, but it sucks.) This prevents understanding the root cause of performance problems for Muni employees, citizens, and elected officials. Realtime data is available, via http://restbus.info/api/agencies/sf-muni/, but this data is not saved for historical analysis. (Edit: Yes it is. Labs 24 did this.) Historical analysis of bus and rail location data would be an effective means to determine the root cause of bunches and gaps in the Muni service. A bunch is when buses or rail cars bunch up together while a gap is longer than the normal wait between a bus or rail car.
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