Metra Route Restoration Study

Services Provided:  Big Data Analytics, COVID Impacts on Travel Demdn, Travel Market Analysis, GTFS Feed summarization, Visualization

 Insight is providing data analytics for Metra’s Route Restoration Study. Metra is the commuter rail system in the Chicago metropolitan area serving the city of Chicago and its surrounding suburbs via the Union Pacific Railroad, BNSF Railway, and other railroads. The system operates 242 stations on 11 rail lines. As ridership has slowly rebounded post COVID, Metra has added back service in different capacities per line, but still overall less than the pre-COVID levels. The primary task of this project is to analyze regional trip origin- 

destination data sets and used the findings to make recommendations to Metra’s schedules to better serve various ridership markets, such as core market to CBD as well as weekend and off-peak markets.  

For internal use and public distribution, the study team is developing 153 zone-specific four-page spreads, each containing a series of maps, tables and graphs. Insight is leading the data processing and summarizing part of the study. 

Insight analyzed Replica data to create zone-specific chloropleth maps of trips flows. Insight also provided data on trips at a block group specific level, to help identify where within each zone trips were happening. Insight also developed data to present time of day histograms of trip flows by hour in 2019 and 2022, enabling pre-and-post pandemic comparisons, and showing shifts in the timing of traveling. 

Conductor train counts and data from the Ventra ticketing app were also analyzed to show shifts in travel behavior. Comparison between Ventra data and Replica data made it possible for Metra to estimate it’s ‘market share’ of total Replica trips that were currently being served by Metra service. Insight summarized GTFS feeds of operating schedules for Fall 2019 and Fall 2023 by daytime (weekday & Saturday) by line, by time period and station, which was used to produce histograms of average trains per hour for zonal travel-sheds for five time periods.

The combination of analysis on market share, GTFS-based service provision, trip distribution with each zone, and trips by time of day permitted Metra to identify day/time/location combinations that would benefit the most from restored service.