OpenTTC — Subway Service Times
The Toronto Subway is a main part of the TTC’s fleet. Millions of people a year travel underneath the city under these electric trains, but only a few thousand hop on immediately when train service begins.
While it’s incredibly easy to grab live data for the TTC Buses and Streetcars, it’s incredibly hard to get proper data for the subways, as the TTC keeps them private.
Well you might think “well, they all arrive at the same time, just duplicate the time, ezmoney.”, and that’s not a bad idea, however, like the subway, we gotta dig a little deeper to understand why this is a complex issue.
First off, when the TTC starts Subway Service, trains are deployed at certain stations first, and work their way up in order to appease the hectic morning rush. What does this mean? Let’s take a look at 2 Subway Stations: Eglinton West, and Vaughan Metro Station.
Now, the first picture shows the First Train arrival time for Eglinton West. Notice how the first train is on the southbound platform, at 6am on the dot. The bottom picture is the first train for Vaughan Metro, since there’s a train yard there, this is quite literally the first train to depart in the southbound portions of the University line (There are identical times for terminus stations on Line 2, and Line 4).
Since there’s a stark difference in arrival times for subway stations, we need to somehow store the arrival times in a list. Thankfully, a lot of these times are the same at certain stations, so a good idea might be to enumerate the different first & last train arrival times.