Data Visualization – Randomness from Gonçalo

STCPontual — are Porto’s buses on time?

Gonçalo Figueiredo — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:27:36 +0000

My hometown, Porto, has been pushing to get people onto public transport. In July, city hall made it free for residents, the tram lines are being extended, parking downtown is being made harder, among other policies. However, in my opinion, price was never the thing holding people back. It’s quality of service, specifically how unreliable buses are at arriving on time.

Around the same time, in June, STCP integrated with Google Maps to show the live positions of its fleet and estimated arrival times at stops. That data is public, and so is the timetable it’s supposed to be keeping to. Nobody was putting the two side by side.

So I built STCPontual. It polls the live vehicle positions, imports STCP’s schedule, matches one against the other, and publishes the result: how puntual are STCP’s buses? What are the worst hours of the day, worst days of the week, least reliable lines, and whether any of it is getting better.

Go to STCPontual

Visualization on how students associate courses when applying to colleges

Gonçalo Figueiredo — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 18:38:00 +0000

To promote omeututor.com – a marketplace for 100% online tutoring I founded in 2018 – I created a blog, which included 2 posts with visualizations about college admissions. This is the second post.

In Portugal, when students apply to colleges, they fill in a list of preferred courses and colleges they would like to be enrolled in, in order of preference. For this post, I got each students’ list of preferences for 2017 and quantified how many times each pair of courses were included in the lists. This calculation weighted how close the preferences are to each other. For example, a student’s first and second preferences have a stronger association than the student’s first and fourth preferences.

My goal with this post was to help students discover alternative courses to their preferred ones, which is important because many students can’t get into their preferred course because they didn’t get the required admission grade. Hopefully, knowing how others build their list of preferences could help a student build his own.

In the visualization, the bigger the circle, the more the course is associated with the one selected in the select-box.

The graph is in Portuguese because the business I was promoting was focused on the Portuguese market.

See the code for this graph.

Visualization of admission-grades to college courses

Gonçalo Figueiredo — Sat, 15 Sep 2018 17:11:00 +0000

In this post, I wanted to help students view the minimum admission grade for different colleges for any particular course.

To use the graph:

Select the courses you want to include.
Select whether you want the previous year’s admission grade (2017) or the average of the previous 3 years (2015-2017).
Place the cursor on top of a grade (circle) to read the information about the college..

Note: only grades for public institutions are included.

The graph is in Portuguese because the business I was promoting was focused on the Portuguese market.

See the code for this graph.