Transportation Data Prototype

Transporter TSI Riot

A punk transportation dashboard that turns monthly Transportation Services Index measures into lane switches, metric panels, cutscenes, and a small browser minigame layer.

By Eric Rhea GameLab prototype Status: Playable static app

The prototype presents public BTS data through an educational interface. It is designed for exploration, not forecasting, investment guidance, or operational transportation planning.

Transporter TSI Riot main explorer with transportation modes, metrics, charts, and generated punk cutscene art

High-Level Overview

Transporter TSI Riot is a static GameLab project that compresses a wide monthly transportation dataset into a small set of readable lanes. The visitor moves between Air, Rail, Surface, and Total TSI views, with the screen swapping charts, headline metrics, and short cutscene panels.

The build focuses on signal selection. The source file has 66 columns, so the prototype deliberately chooses a smaller set of series instead of dumping every field into one table. That makes the interaction easier to scan while keeping the source trail visible.

What the Prototype Lets You Do

  • Open a static browser dashboard built from transportation_services_index.csv.
  • Switch between Air, Rail, Surface, and Total TSI lanes to compare transportation signals.
  • Inspect latest values for freight, passenger, total index, air RPM, rail intermodal, truck, transit, and related indexed measures.
  • Use tutorial, settings, credits, and cutscene screens without needing a backend or CDN.
  • Play with a local generated-art presentation layer that keeps the data source explicit in the credits.

Source Backbone

The source note captures the exact dataset used to generate the project-local data module and keeps the wide-table caveat visible.

Local file transportation_services_index.csv, retrieved 2026-07-01, 154,495 bytes, with 316 data rows and 66 columns.
Publisher Bureau of Transportation Statistics, distributed through Data.gov and the data.transportation.gov API.
Integrity SHA-256: f1fa531faf5079be04b66aba5c27a435f7f4526779cabe9f41d9ff1572b09051.

Build Detail

The playable app ships as static HTML, CSS, JavaScript modules, local Three.js, project-local generated art, and a generated data module derived from the local CSV. The design keeps each lane focused because the source includes aviation, rail, transit, petroleum, natural gas, waterborne, trucking, freight index, passenger index, total transportation index, industrial production, and related indexed measures.

Related builds

Motor Fuel Underground narrows in on fuel-tax rates. Micromobility Riot Map maps city-year mobility systems. First Job Finder is another public-data decision-support prototype.