Seattle Late School Buses

Technologies: Python, Flask, BeautifulSoup, PostgreSQL, Javascript, React, MapBoxGL

Web App / Visualization

Frontend Repo

This web app documents and reports late Seattle Public School buses. I was inspired to work on this project by the understanding that student achievement is negatively affected by tardiness. I started this project in Jupyter notebooks while teaching high school data science.

The software builds a database of daily late buses with key information such as school, route, minutes late, and date. This information is available publicly on a per-day basis, but no historical database or public APIs exist. The project uses a Flask app to scrape the Seattle Schools webpage, parse it using regex, and post the data to PostgreSQL. The post request is triggered from a cron job on BEEW.io and the back-end service is deployed to Heroku. The front-end web application is React with MapBoxGL and is deployed to GitHub pages.

To establish a proof-of-concept I created a notebook in Deepnote. The Deepnote platform provides a scheduler for running the notebook and a dashboard for publishing the data and maps. The dashboard can be viewed here.

Seattle Late School Buses API

This API scrapes data from https://www.seattleschools.org/departments/transportation/latebus/

It is deployed here: https://seattle-school-buses.herokuapp.com/

Quick Start

1. Clone this repository.
2. Create and activate a virtual environment
   • python3 -m venv venv
   • source venv/bin/activate
3. Install the requirements.txt
   • pip install -r requirements.txt
4. Create the following postgres database on your machine:
   • seattle_school_buses
5. Create a .env file with the following line:
   • SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI=postgresql+psycopg2://postgres:postgres@localhost:5432/seattle_school_buses
6. Apply migrations to the database:
   • flask db upgrade
7. Run the server
   • flask run

Endpoints

Route	Response Code	Response Body	Example Response Body
GET /schools	200	JSON where the keys are school names, and the values are a dictionary that includes the details for each school.	{"Adams": {"address":"6110 28th Ave NW","id":42,"lat":"47.6732465522865","lng":"-122.39295255961478","name":"Adams","option_alt":"N/A","type":"elementary school","zip":"98107"},...}
GET /buses	200	A list of all late bus dictionaries.	[{"day":"23","duration":"40","id":1,"month":"September","route":"268","school":"South Shore","school_id":39,"time":"am","units":"minutes","year":"2022"},{"day":"23","duration":"35","id":2,"month":"September","route":"379","school":"Rainier Beach","school_id":12,"time":"am","units":"minutes","year":"2022"},...]
POST /buses	201	A list of a the new late buses dictionaries added to the database.	[{"day":"24","duration":"30","id":245,"month":"October","route":"1787","school":"Lowell","school_id":73,"time":"am","units":"minutes","year":"2022"}]
-	200	The response where there is no new buses data to add to the database	{"message":"no new buses"}
-	400	Error response with information about the error.	{"message": f"buses could not be added {error}"