Authority Invites the Public to Explore the MTA’s 134 Open Data Sets to Create Projects That Uncover and Share Data-Driven Insights About Transportation in New York
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) today launched a data challenge – the Authority’s first of its kind – that it hopes will lead members of the public to transform its vast volumes of open data into web apps, maps, data visualizations, written reports or art works that shed light on how New York moves.
“The MTA has focused on being more transparent about its operations and financial performance –and we’ve stepped up our game by publishing more open data than any public transportation agency in the country,” said Jon Kaufman, MTA Chief of Strategic Initiatives. “We’re inviting anyone and everyone to tap into our massive open data sets and produce insightful and creative projects that shed additional light on the system that moves nearly 5M New Yorkers every day. Whether they help show how people get where they need to go more quickly, how they pay, or additional MTA budget transparency, we are excited to see what the community can create.”
Challenge participants can choose from 134 open datasets across transportation modes and subject areas including ridership, service performance, operating budget, OMNY adoption, elevator availability, safety, and more. This month-long competition coincides with the three-year anniversary of the MTA Open Data Act, signed by Governor Hochul in October 2021.
Projects in any medium are welcome, such as a web app, map, static data visualization, written report or piece of art, as long as it uses at least one MTA dataset on data.ny.gov.
Submissions must be emailed to opendata@mtahq.org by 11:59 p.m. EDT on Friday, Oct. 25, 2024. The email subject line should be MTA 2024 Open Data Challenge Submission and include the following as attachments to the email:
- Your project
- A project description, including your name and name(s) of any additional contributors to the project, a brief description of the project (no more than 500 words), a link to the project if it is publicly available and link(s) to the MTA open dataset(s) on data.ny.gov used in the project
- A completed and signed submission form allowing for public sharing of any project, which can be downloaded here
Submissions will be judged on creativity, utility, execution and transparency. Full competition guidelines can be found here.
The winner will receive an item from the vintage New York City Transit memorabilia collection. The winning project will be featured in a blog post on the MTA’s Data & Analytics blog and on the MTA’s social media accounts.
The MTA Open Data program is managed by the Data & Analytics team, the MTA's center of excellence in the management, usage, and sharing of data. Its three main functions are to aggregate and harmonize the MTA’s many diverse data sources, to devise and automate creative analyses that uncover valuable insights in that data, and to publicly share the resulting products.