You have to start somewhere. So I took a week of delays and put them on a map. There were 37 incidents in a seven-day period. I took all the notices issued and coded them onto a map. Sometimes there were 2-3 notices for one incident (multiple routes affected, service gradually returns). I grouped these as one incident.
I sorted them by cause (mechanical, collision, police, passenger alarm).
Here's the first map I did. Click on a few incidents for details:
View A week of TTC delays - pointers in a larger map
Here's a lengend of what each one is:
Turquoise: mechanical/signal issue
Red: collision
Yellow: road closure/construction
Green: passenger alarm/illness
Puple: police/fire investigation
Pink: power issues
icons: St. Patty's parade (green walker) and Union Station's ongoing issues (red warning sign)
Google doesn't yet have a feature to create your own legend. It would have been helpful to have a clickable one that isolates each cause. The Toronto Star's homicide map does this, but the source code shows it's done through clever frames and script usage.
I made a copy of the map using Google's icons. But they're a big large, tacky and not the most relevant (a customs officer is police/fire, and taxis mean collision — get it?)
View A week of TTC delays - icons in a larger map
Maps are one of the most popular parts of multi-platform journalism, especially since so much of it is hyperlocal. It helps us understand the wider picture when talking about complex issues, like transit funding and planning.
It's unfortunate not a lot of information can be retrieved by the TTC. Though a large media partner could probably partner with them to have pre-coded updates (that the news org simply submits into an ongoing map). Maybe one day.
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