Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

6-2026

Document Type

Master's Capstone Project

Degree Name

Master of Science

Program

Data Analysis & Visualization

Advisor

Michelle McSweeney

Abstract

Every weekday, millions of people trust two radically different urban rail systems to get them where they need to go. New York City’s Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT) group threads through the boroughs in a branching web of eight lines. Tokyo’s Yamanote Line runs as a single, closed loop around the capital’s core. Both systems move enormous volumes of people through dense, high-demand environments, but they do it in fundamentally different ways, and they share very different amounts of information about how they’re doing it. According to federal reporting, MTA New York City Transit served over 1.1 billion unlinked passenger trips in 2023, making it by far the largest transit agency in the country (Federal Transit Administration, 2023). These two systems carry histories as distinct as their geometries. The BMT traces its origins to the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, a private operator that electrified and expanded Brooklyn’s elevated and surface lines beginning in the 1890s (Feinman, n.d.; History Associates, 2024). After the company went bankrupt in the wake of a catastrophic 1918 crash at Malbone Street, still the deadliest accident in New York subway history, its assets passed through receivership and were eventually purchased by the City of New York in 1940, when the BMT was unified with the IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit, the city’s first subway operator, also privately run) and the IND (Independent Subway System, a municipally built and operated network) into the public system that became today’s MTA (New York Times, 1975). That history of private failure, public takeover, and decades of deferred investment under municipal v ownership left structural legacies in aging signals, mixed loading gauges, and fragmented line management that continue to shape BMT performance today. The Yamanote Line’s origins are equally layered. Opened in 1885 by the state-run Nippon Railway as a freight bypass around central Tokyo, the line was gradually electrified and converted to passenger service in the early twentieth century, nationalized under Japanese Government Railways in 1906, and eventually passed to the newly privatized JR East when Japan National Railways was broken up in 1987 (East Japan Railway Company, 2022). The loop was completed to its present 34-station, 34.5- kilometer form after decades of incremental extension. The two systems’ twentieth centuries diverged sharply: the BMT’s was defined by fiscal crisis, while the Yamanote’s was shaped by postwar reconstruction, rapid economic growth, and continuous reinvestment, a divergence in institutional trajectory that this project argues is inseparable from the differences in reliability and data transparency visible today. This capstone project, presented as an interactive Quarto website titled “Ride the Line,” compares the BMT and the Yamanote Line across four dimensions: network structure, passenger demand, service frequency, and reliability. NYC data is drawn from MTA open data sources including hourly ridership, monthly on-time performance (OTP) reports, and GTFS schedule files. Tokyo data combines JR East’s publicly available GTFS schedules (via the ODPT open data platform) with official annual station boarding statistics from jreast.co.jp. A key finding of this project is not just what the systems look like, but what they are willing to show. The MTA publishes hourly ridership, terminal-level OTP, and detailed schedule data. JR East publishes annual station totals and scheduled GTFS but does not release hourly ridership or retrospective delay archives publicly. That asymmetry in data transparency is itself a finding: Tokyo achieves world-class reliability without publishing the data to prove it in real vi time, while NYC’s radical openness enables public accountability that the MTA’s performance record requires. The website is built with R, Quarto, plotly, and leaflet, and is hosted on GitHub Pages. The full data pipeline from raw MTA CSVs and JR East GTFS to render interactive charts is reproducible from the project’s GitHub repository.

Link to the project: https://andreina-abreu.github.io/capstone-train-story/

Additional Files
capstone-train-story-main.zip (15736 kB)
Zip file of GitHub repository at time of submission
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