neil-kuldip/2020divhacks

2020DivHacks

Track: Planning Urban Spaces

Question: How can we make a city's public transportation easier and more reliable?

Members: Moris Goldshtein, Neil Kuldip, Luna Shin

Inspiration: We have been NYC residents throughout our lives and we have relied on the MTA for the majority of what we have done in our lives thus far. Without the MTA, we would not have had the invaluable access to the city. Even in college, we continue to require the MTA with us constantly using buses, the F, 7, and 6 trains. We believe that the MTA transportation system, while often taken for granted, is not fairly accessible and that mentally visualizing this notion is difficult. Thus, we wanted to design a project to allow other residents to see how, depending on location, one person may have better access to the MTA than another.

Learned: For this project, we learned how to use API requests, html, gmaps, pandas, and Jupyter.

How it was built: We used Python and Jupyter along with the Google Javascript API.

Challenges: We have never used gmaps, APIs, pandas, html, and Jupyter before. Learning to access specific APIs and use gmaps was especially difficult due to many guides on the Internet discussing them in very specific manners rather than explaining general utilization. We had to take a lot of time to research these aspects of the project which decreased our time window for creating the project. In addition, it was difficult to allocate time to work on the project due to college assignments.