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this shows a map of the 49 bus route and all the main stops
What is the 49 bus?
The 49 Western bus is a major bus route that is essential for transportation in Chicago. The bus travels north and south on Western street, ranging from Brewyn Ave to 79th street covering 15.6 miles. Because it has high ridership, the route is designated as having “Owl service,” meaning it operates 24/7, including overnight hours. Unlike many bus routes, the 49 bus has a higher frequency of buses, with about one bus every 10-15 minutes. The 49 bus provides major connections to the most frequently used trains such as: Brown Line, Blue Line and Orange Line. These connections extend its range making it easily accessible and useful for daily transportation.
How is the 49 significant to Lane Tech?
Since Lane Tech is on the street Addison and Western, the 49 bus as well as the 152 bus, play key roles in transportation to Lane Tech because they reach the street Lane Tech is on. The 49 bus is also highly significant for Lane tech students because of its huge span and coverage across Chicago. With such major connections, as previously mentioned, the 49 western bus is great for reaching various places and getting Lane Tech students to school. The 49 bus has the Addison bus stop which stops directly in front of the school, which is where many students are seen getting off in the morning and boarding after school. If you were to look at the 49 bus right as school is about to start (at around 7:45), you will see the 49 bus stops swarmed with students all excited to start their day at Lane Tech!
disclaimer: some of the data that we had worked with has some errors and inconsistancies. Considering that the CTA had to track all of the people boarding and getting off, it is extremely hard to maintain perfect and polished data. Our students had to work around this, so some of the results might not be 100% accurate
Here we see the stops that has the most people exit and the stops that have the least people exit in weekdays in october. The stops with the most alightings are larger and more popular streets in the city compared to the least alightings where many are side streets.
*note that the scale of average off rates for the graphs are not to scale in comparing least and most aligtings
Here we see the most commonly boarded on stops southbound for weekdays in october and the least commonly boarded ones. The stop of Addison being one of the most common makes sense because that is where many Lane Tech students board after school and also the orange line stop because that is a place where commuters transfer.
*note that the scale on average on rates for the graphs are not to scale in comparing least and most aligtings
Here we see alightings and on boardings throghout the day on weekdays for the month of may. We can see that for both graphs, they peak at around 7am ( around the time many people leave for school or work), decrease during the day and then spike up around 3pm, and then decrease from there.
Here, we looked into the frequency of boardings on the 49 bus going northbound throughout a day in may. When analyzing the graph, we can see that the average boardings increase until around 7:00 am, then drop slightly before reaching its overall peak at around 3:00 pm. This could demonstrate that the 152 is frequently used to commute to school or work, since the ridership is highest around the times that work and school are typically in.
To the right, we see that the trends in on boardings and alightings are nearly identical peaking around 3pm which correlates with the end of the school day. Though this is what the data has shown, it shows some inconsistancys with the data because it is imposiible that the average off-rates were higher then the average on rates.
Here we see similar trends in both boardings and alightings for the western bus going northbound. We see that the peak for both boardings and aligthings is at 3pm when many schools get out. We also see that there is a signigificant peak around both 7 and 8am times where many people are commuting to school and work. We see after 3pm botht the boardings and alightings significantly decrease until the end of the day where we see the low in both boardings and alightings.
Does Lane Tech school days actually correlate to 49 bus ridership?
We then looked into how the 49 bus stops around Lane tech have specifically been affected by the school days. The 49 bus is typically packed with students after school, all trying to catch a ride. From this we decided to dive deeper into ridership of people (presumably students) by creating heat maps of the on rates (rate of passengers that get on at a particular stop) and off rates (rate of passengers that get off at a particular stop) of the 49 bus on a month which school is in(October), versus a month which school is out(July). A typical Lane Tech school starts at 8:00 am (but students are expected to arrive at 7:45), and it ends at 3:15 pm. As previously stated, the Addison stop is the bus stop that stops right in front of Lane Tech, so we decided to specifically look deeper into that stop.
When looking at the bus data, the data is set up so that there is typically a 20-30 minute period in which the data does not calculate the time the bus reaches a specific stop. This means that when looking at the western bus stop right in front of Lane, we typically want to add 20-30 minutes after what the time reads. This being said, when the time reads 7:00, this typically means people exit the bus at around 7:30. (data is in military time units)
When looking at the 49 western bus at the Addison stop in October, a month which school is in, we graphed the frequency of the off rates and on rates throughout the day, specifically narrowed down to weekdays (days which school is in). Looking at the graphs we can see a strong correlation between when school starts and ends and the 152 bus rider ship. At 7:00 am (about 7:30), we can notice that there is a concentrated amount of people who exit the 49 bus going south. Surprisingly, when looking at the concentration of people getting on the 152, although it is concentrated after school at 3:00(3:30), the direction is the same as the way people exit the bus. This means that for some reason, as opposed to most people taking the bus south then taking the bus north to go back the same direction, many people use the same south bus to get to and from school. This could also be due to outside forces since we cannot ensure that most of the passengers are students, but based off in person Lane observations, we noticed most people taking the 49 bus at 3:30 at the Addison stop, are Lane Tech students. When looking at the same stop right in front of Lane Tech in July, a month when school is out, we can see that the bus on and off rates are way more dispersed throughout the whole day. This shows that Lane Tech school is most likely the leading factor in this strong correlation of ridership during school days. From this, we can infer that many students use the southbound 49 bus to get to school and many use the 49 southbound bus to also get home from school.
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