Related Work
Public Transport Isochrone References
Existing projects show that public transport accessibility is a well-established visualization topic:
- Mapnificent is a classic browser-based public transport isochrone tool built on GTFS data. It illustrates the analytical value of varying origin and departure time in reachability maps.
- TravelTime shows how travel-time maps can support accessibility stories across multiple transport modes and realistic transfer assumptions.
These references validate the general visual framing, but they do not remove the need for a project-specific analytical angle.
Standards That Matter For Extension
Two GTFS features are especially relevant for future work:
- GTFS Pathways for modeling in-station movement, entrances, stairs, elevators, and traversal time
- GTFS transfers.txt for minimum transfer times and route-specific transfer rules
These standards are important because the current Milestone 1 model still uses a fixed transfer dwell rather than detailed walking or station-internal navigation.
Originality
The originality of SwissReach lies in the combination of design choices:
- a nationwide Swiss perspective rather than a single-city demo
- a rail-first scope that remains narrow enough to stay feasible
- station-level deduplication to bridge raw GTFS data and visualization-friendly interaction
- an analytical structure that mixes network activity, single-origin reachability, amenity access, and retail comparison
The resulting contribution lies in transforming a large transit feed into a clear, data-visualization-oriented narrative that remains feasible within the course timeline.
It is also important to note that the topic was chosen and partly explored before the EPFL COM-490 assignment was released. Once it became clear that the original public-transport accessibility idea overlapped heavily with Assignment 1, the project was intentionally extended with amenity-count and retail-density analyses in order to create clearer analytical separation.
Design Inspirations
The current design draws on three visualization ideas:
- isochrone maps for communicating time-based accessibility
- hub rankings for showing network centrality through traffic volume
- comparison matrices for making time-of-day and origin differences legible without forcing users to inspect one map at a time
This combination is particularly suitable for a VitePress-based project site because it supports both static reporting and a path toward richer interactive views.
