Code for Transportation 2nd Place
BuzzTeam | USA
When a crash, snow, or sudden failure knocks out a bus or train line, transit agencies come up with inefficient detours, causing riders to lose access to clinics, schools, and grocery stores. This affects everyone, but especially older people, students, and riders with disabilities who depend on a single transit line to stay connected to their daily life.
LIFELINE is an interactive web application built on GTFS timetable data that lets anyone check a city's transit network for robustness. Users can click any route on a live map to simulate an outage, and a custom-modified RAPTOR routing engine recalculates every neighborhood's access to healthcare, education, and food in milliseconds, recoloring the map to show exactly who is stranded and where. A searchable dashboard ranks every line from riskiest to safest, and sliders let users decide what matters most to them (healthcare, schools, or groceries) while checking how different times of day change the picture.
The app also helps solve the problem it diagnoses. Users choose a budget of emergency shuttle buses, and a greedy submodular optimization algorithm places them along the severed corridors where they restore the most access to clinics, schools, and grocery stores to ensure that in times of distress, these services remain accessible.
By combining graph algorithms, real-time simulation, and operations research, LIFELINE demonstrates how computer science can make public transportation more resilient and more equitable. It supports UN Sustainable Development Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, Goal 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure through resilient infrastructure, and Goal 3: Good Health and Well-Being by keeping medical care reachable when the network is down. Because GTFS is used by thousands of agencies worldwide, LIFELINE scales to any city on Earth. It runs in any browser, with no new data collection and no new hardware.
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