- Aggregation: The categories or numerical ranges that data is bucketed into in order to conduct analysis or create visualizations.
For example, income ranges or census tracts.
- Automated Fare Collection (AFC): Systems, including ticket machines, faregates, and fareboxes, that collect data when riders pay for transit.
- Automated or Automatic Passenger Counters (APC): Devices, usually at the doors of a transit vehicle, that count people boarding or exiting.
- Distribution: The way a dataset is spread out and how many times a value occurs
- General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS): A format transit agencies have adopted to share data with apps and to the public.
- Location based services (LBS): A term for data collected from the location setting on smartphone apps, data from cell phones is also collected from
the location of cell towers when the phone is used.
- National Transit Database (NTD): Transit agencies are required to submit certain data to NTD.
The type of data depends on the size of the agency, and can include ridership, service, revenue and expenses, and safety data.
Data is comparable across agencies and over time.
- Population: A population dataset includes all of the data in the universe being analyzed.
- Qualitative data: Data that can’t easily be expressed or reduced to a number; provides qualities, experiences, descriptions, and characteristics.
- Quantitative data: Data that can be expressed as a number, time, or location.
- Sample: A dataset that includes some of the possible data in the universe being analyzed so requires additional consideration over whether it is
representative of the population. Samples can be scaled or weighted in order to be representative.
- Targeted Sample: A sample dataset that doesn’t need to be representative because the question requires data from a specific group.
- Travel demand models: Models use data on existing travel, demographics, and land use to estimate the impacts of new transportation projects or
land use changes or estimate travel out into the future.
Transit Data Primer
Acknowledgements