Taylor Swift’s Toronto shows inspire students to improve traffic

On By Littum

Students from Northeastern’s campuses in Toronto and Vancouver participated in a hackathon to try to predict traffic patterns that could paralyze the city.

main photo by Erin Kayata

Taylor Swift sings into a microphone wearing a sparkly bodysuit on the Eras Tour.
Taylor Swift’s Eras tour is currently in Toronto, which means traffic for the city. Photo by Scott A Garfitt/Invision

Taylor Swift will perform six shows in Toronto over the next two weeks, marking the end of her Eras tour. Her presence also marks “problems, problems, problems” – as the singer once sang – for the city’s traffic situation.

Congestion in Toronto gets so bad during events that Irish singer and former One Direction star Niall Horan had to leave his car and go to the venue for his own show this summer after being caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

But Northeastern and its students are looking to change that. The university recently hosted a hackathon for students at its Toronto and Vancouver campuses, where they were challenged to analyze data from a past Lady Gaga concert to predict traffic flow during Swift’s shows that can be used to alleviate traffic to events.

The winning team of students from Northeastern’s Vancouver campus found through analysis that concertgoers tend to arrive in Toronto through a concentrated area, but then disperse as they leave. That information can help the city manage future events, said Yvonne Leung, an assistant professor of analytics who helped organize the event.

Students present at a hackathon.
Courtesy photo
A room full of students sitting on couches while a student presents.
Courtesy photo
A student presents at a hackathon.
Courtesy photo
Students from Northeastern’s Toronto and Vancouver campuses participated in a hackathon last week to predict the city’s traffic patterns during major events. Courtesy photos

“We could use the data to predict how people move and provide real-time insights to help the city manage traffic,” Leung said. “We can understand at different dates, times or events how people move.”

The winning team took data from people’s movements through events and used a web-based interactive computing platform, Jupyter Notebook, to generate coordinates to determine precisely where people were moving. They then created charts in Infogram, a web-based interactive visualization platform, to illustrate the data in a way that was easy to understand.

The winning team of three, all graduate students in the computer science program in Vancouver, said they wanted to participate because the hackathon offered a good way to learn practical skills like GIS mapping.

“We just wanted to be involved, and I thought this hackathon was forever (because) it contributes to the local communities,” said Hao Niu, a third-year computer science student in Vancouver.

Niu was paired with fellow Vancouver students Panxin “Claire” Lu, a third-year graduate student in computer science, and Zheng Gu, a second-year graduate student in computer science. None of the students knew each other before, but showed up to work on the problem in person.

The group said they learned how to use GIS, a computer system that analyzes and displays geographic information. The day-long hackathon gave them the chance to learn these new skills and then apply them to the challenge.

“We had some pretty good ideas before we got the data,” Lu said. “After receiving the data, it checked it and tried to visualize it on the maps.”

The group ultimately found that traffic was more concentrated when people were heading toward the city center, especially when fans arrived from the airport. But the crowds dispersed as people left the city after the event or went to explore Toronto, showing a need for adaptive traffic control after the concerts ended.

The number of people traveling on a route can reach hundreds of thousands, the group found.

“We tried to present a community-focused idea instead of being distracted by the influence of different arts,” Niu said. “No matter how many fans you have, the arena capacity is fixed. We didn’t focus on the artists, but instead, what is the impact of the local communities?”

The group suggested in the final presentation that the data could be used to also help first responders position themselves in high-traffic areas in case of emergencies.

The hackathon was judged by officials from Northeastern and the City of Toronto, including the Director of Traffic Management.

“The judges are professionals in the industry,” Lu said. “I feel their suggestions are super valuable.”

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