Level: High School

Creator: Concord Consortium

Topic: Urban Planning

Link

Modeling traffic data is important for urban planning, creating transportation systems, and even predicting how much foot traffic a retail store can expect in a given day. This genre of dynamic data science activities could be classified as “finding a needle in a haystack,” giving students a chance to mine big data to make insights about traffic use.

According to the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, about 400,000 people used the BART system daily in 2018. In BARTy, students investigate BART data from 2015 to learn about passenger use and explore traffic patterns. The Teacher Guide includes a game-like investigation to locate a “mystery meeting,” and suggests ways to help students figure out peak passenger use, popular stations, and the impact of events in San Francisco on BART usage.