Metro door opening durations - Cross-city comparison
June 11, 2022
Riding the metro in Mexico City, I was struck by how briefly their doors open at the stops. So I began measuring the number of seconds the doors remained open, and I repeated the measurement in San Francisco over the course of a month to collect the data shown below.
The doors of the metro in Mexico City are open much more briefly at their stops compared to the BART in San Francisco (medians: 10s vs. 28s).
Data collection methodology
A Google Pixel 3 with Google Sheets was installed for easy data entry. At each new stop, immediately after the doors began to open, the time on a Mobvoi Ticwatch Pro 3 was noted, in seconds-resolution. This process was repeated when the doors began to close, and the time difference was recorded as the number of seconds the doors were open at that stop in this Google Sheet.
Future analysis
It could be interesting to look into some further relationships, such as:
- time of day effect (and relative to rush hour)
- metro line and direction effect
- particular stops (e.g. transfer points) effects
- autocorrelations in stop duration
It would likely help to collect more data to make any of these claims with confidence.