LiveCivic
MetroTrack
A love letter to Chicago, told through its transit
Chicagoland transit is being restructured with a huge funding reallocation across CTA, Pace, and Metra — and there's no single place to see where the money goes or who it serves. MetroTrack is that tracker.
Three pillars: funding (budget vs. actuals), mapping (routes and stops against population, jobs, and destinations), and hiring (vacancy rates over time) — built on PostGIS and a dbt/DuckDB transform layer, served through an Astro frontend with MapLibre.
What I learned
- Coverage is a spatial question first — the interesting gaps only show up when routes meet where people actually are.
- Neutral civic data is most useful when it's boring and legible: the design has to get out of the way of the numbers.