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.