New Jersey Transit Bus Advisories
Data Collection began in May 2021. Windows task scheduler automatically ran a python script to collect XML data from New Jersey Transit website. The amount of advisories spike on some days. Graphs/charts up to date as of May 10th 2022. The huge spike in advisories on Jan 5th 2022 was primarily due to heavy traffic in the lincoln tunnel with traffic in other locations.
The top 10 busses with the most advisories are shown. The #505, 114, and the 1 bus have the most with 1023, 832, and 809 advisories respectively. The #505 serves local Atlantic City. The #114 serves Bridgewater to New York. The #1 serves parts of Jersey City and Newark.
Each description was parsed for common words. The top 5 common words were found to be traffic, operator availability, detour, weather, and accident. The most surprising word is operator availability. New Jersey Transit is in need of bus operators. If a bus is scheduled to leave at time X with no bus operator, then NJT will send out an advisory that states bus line Y at time X will not run due to operator availability.
Each bus can be grouped into a group (0,1,2...) based off the busses hundreds digit. For example the bus line 120 is in bus group 1. Some advisories are more common in certain groups. Heat maps were created to visualize this. Group 1 had more traffic advisories compared to other groups. This is understandable since group 1 is primarily composed of bus lines from New Jersey to New York City, which require using the Lincoln Tunnel, Holland Tunnel, or the George Washington Bridge. The blockage of one of these routes can easily cause the amount of advisories for many bus routes. The majority of the bus fleet (~50) are in bus groups 0 and 1. The numbers were normalized against the number of unique bus lines in each group. This revealed that bus groups 4,5, and 6 had many of the operator availability advisories. Bus groups 4,5, and 6 primarily serve southern New Jersey.
