How can trip data from accessible transportation services be converted into useful information, to allow for the delivery of a service that offers more flexibility to persons with disabilities?
Project Overview
The City of Hamilton is always looking for ways to improve the overall customer experience when using public transit. The goal of this project is to explore different opportunities to provide public transit service to persons with disabilities. The city currently provides provides door-to-door service to clients who qualify for accessible transportation service (ATS). The service is provided by a contractor. Subscription trips are booked for recurring medical appointments or other activities, while clients booking “casual trips” can reserve a trip seven days in advance of their trip to ensure it can be provided. While clients reserve custom destinations, they may have shared travel with other customers enroute to destinations as drivers balance the demand for efficient service. Clients are able to travel within Hamilton but can also cross municipal boundaries such as trips to Burlington, and Niagara, or be connected with other services such as GO Transit. In such trips, ATS will either connect clients to services at the outskirts of the boundary to continue their trip, or drop them off at GO stations such as West Harbour, Hamilton GO, Centennial, and McMaster University. There is a significant amount of data available that details where these clients are travelling to and from, along with client demographics and mobility requirements. A data set provided by ATS is for the 2019 year which omits COVID-19 irregularities. This data consists of 844,007 trips.
In Scope
Convert data from an ATS to information that will provide insights including, but not limited to:
Ambulatory/non-ambulatory trips
Determine major trip destinations
Heat maps
Trips by Ward
Inter-regional trips
Volume by time & day
Background Research
Feel free to combine the data provided by the city with open data to further generate insights on the accessible transportation services in Hamilton. You may want to explore HSR open data from the City of Hamilton, and other supporting HSR and City of Hamilton strategy documents to see if there is correlation with ATS data and any additional insight generated . There are plenty of opportunities to move beyond the provided data set such as the Open Data portal, Transportation Master Plan, LRT, and Ten Year Local Transit Strategy
City Staff: Marco Mostacci, Senior Project Manager; Nancy Purser, Manager; Michelle Martin, Manager - Accessible Transportation Services
Faculty: Steven Way, Coordinator/Professor, Analytics for Business Decision Making
Course: HEAD Competition, 85+ Students
