A fun fact about NYC's buses: many of the routes are turn-by-turn replicas of previous streetcar routes; Brooklyn alone had dozens[1]. The B46[2], for example, follows the Utica-Reid line as it ran until 1951.

They never actually tore up most of these lines; the city just paved over them. You can see them poking through the pavement whenever the city redoes the roads.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_streetcar_lines_in_Bro...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B46_(New_York_City_bus)

We are excited for Open Data users to dig into this dataset, experiment, and find insights from the “speed sample of NYC’s streets” that the MTA’s 4,900 buses collect each day. This data will be uploaded on a monthly basis, and can be found on the NYS Open Data portal.

What a great dataset and effort to allow for further research into areas of the city that could benefit from anti-congestion measures (cough cough car tax) to improve bus services!

Also - where does one even store 4,900 buses in NYC? I guess most of the fleet is out on the streets all day, but I imagine servicing all of those is quite the feat.

NYC has one of the best open data portals out there. Kudos to all the teams and agencies who manage it.

MTA seems to be seriously upping their technology game over the past few years. Anecdotally, I've noticed their apps seem to have better UX and are more reliable. I'd be curious to learn what organization changes have happened to enable this.

The embedded video does not work for me on Android (neither chrome or firefox, I think it is because it adds an iframe with a /embed/ link with autoplay via javascript after the "Watch this video" button has been pressed)

This is the youtube link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MsHGqVuIK5g

maybe someone will finally highlight how ridiculous the gridlock is on the b44-sbs route, particularly through south williamsburg. I regularly see convoys of 4-5 buses arriving at the same time because the traffic through that neighborhood is so bad that the buses eventually catch up to each other and I regularly have to wait 30+ minutes for it on either end of the route.

Just downloaded all the data as a 2.45GB csv file. It took about 10 minutes to "export", before the download started.

Do you need the data to know that busses are insanely slow?

From the context (buses mentioned) I'm assuming this about the Metropolitan Transportation Authority? I had to search for how the "MTA" abbreviation can be expanded. My mind resolves "MTA" to "Mail Transport Agent".