Metro-North Railroad add availability feature to Google map
Passenger flow or crowd management became a hot topic during the pandemic as public transit agencies were required to follow strict occupancy norms. Many transit agencies started building applications to share crowding levels on transit vehicles to allow riders to plan their trip in advance.
Metro-North Railroad, a part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) New York, has earlier launched the feature to show the seating availability in the Metro-North Train Time app. Metro-North has now started to share the seating availability data to Google Maps.
The seating availability feature was launched in November 2020 for most trains of the Harlem and Hudson Lines, and expanded to all east of Hudson trains later through Train Time™ app. Now, the riders can check the same data on their google map and find out the estimated numbers of passengers in each coach in real-time.
Metro-North is calculating the numbers of riders in each coach by weight sensors data from the suspension system. The weight value data is transmitted to the control center in real-time, from which a nearly precise estimate of how many customers are on board can be derived. This method is not very accurate but still provides a good estimation of passengers in each coach.
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telegraph
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