For the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s data and analytics team, January 5, 2025, felt a lot like kismet.
Three and a half years earlier, New York state legislators had passed a law requiring the MTA to release “easily accessible, understandable, and usable” data to the public; by January 2022, MTA chair and CEO Janno Lieber officially announced the new team’s formation. Meanwhile, New York City’s controversial congestion pricing program, which tolls cars entering Manhattan’s busiest streets, officially kicked off in 2019 but was chugging through a lengthy setup process, with the transit agency and state fighting lawsuits, politicians, and vocal naysayers along the way.
So when the program finally started in January, the MTA’s data and analytics team had prepared. They could see the moment the tolling started right in the spreadsheets. “The day that it turned on, one field changed from ‘no revenue collection’ to ‘revenue,’” says Andy Kuziemko, the deputy chief of the data and analytics team.
A few days later, the team was pumping out data on vehicle entries into the zone in 10-minute increments, and posting the data on its website, so that New Yorkers themselves could decide whether the congestion program was actually reducing traffic on city streets. The agency has been doing it since. You—yes, you—can view and download the MTA’s data right here.
The online web pages aren’t flashy, but they represent a rare and comprehensive public transit win for open-data advocates, who argue that access to well-maintained public datasets is crucial to government transparency and efficiency.
Since 2022, the MTA’s data and analytics team has grown to 26 full-time employees, who spend their workdays centralizing information that was once scattered through the entire MTA. The agency, to be clear, is big. The nation’s largest, it carries some 5.9 million riders on subways, buses, commuter railways, and through tunnels and bridges every day. That’s a lot of numbers to track.
Really a lot; MTA now publishes more than 180 datasets. Recent additions include more than a decade’s worth of data on the time MTA employees spend on “productive tasks,” a new dataset on subway-delay-causing incidents; and bus speeds on Manhattan’s most crowded downtown roads. Kuziemko says 30 more datasets are becoming publicly available “in the near future.”
Counter Intelligence
In an interview, Kuziemko and MTA chief of strategic initiatives Jon Kaufman credited a new culture of intra-agency data sharing for the renewed program. In 2023, leadership encouraged managers across the agency to allow their data to be ingested into the MTA’s “data lake,” which can be refined, stripped of identifying information, and eventually published openly. (Some of the MTA’s data contains the personally identifiable information of commuters; the agency says this specific data is not published for the public.) The agency has also started using new in-house software and tools, which give them technical capabilities they didn’t have before. “We have paid for zero hours of consulting time, which is a thing we’re really proud of—that we actually built in-house expertise in the public sector,” says Kuziemko. “It’s really cool.”
“It’s rare for a government agency to share this level of data granularity,” says Sarah Kaufman, who directs the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation and once led the agency’s open-data program. In fact, it’s something like an about-face for the MTA, which before 2009 made a habit of legally pursuing developers who scraped system timetable and route data to build rider-friendly apps.
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#Congestion #Pricing #Working #MTAs #Revamped #Data #Team #Figuring

![‘Ninja Scroll’ Is Slashing Back to Theaters in October
The 1993 samurai anime film Ninja Scroll is coming back with a limited theatrical run this fall. Per IGN, Iconic Events and AMC are teaming for a re-release on October 4, 5, and 7. (At time of writing, it’s exclusively locked to North America.) The remastered version will play its original 35mm negatives in 4K using a process that “repairs any damage and [performs] color correction to create an archival-quality digital master of the film.” Directed and written by Yoshiaki Kawajiri and created by Animate Film, Ninja Scroll tells the story of mercenary swordsman Kibagamei Jubei. Set in feudal Japan, Jubei is tasked with killing the Eight Devils of Kimon, supernatural ninjas aiming to take over the Tokugawa shogunate. Praised for its animation and action, the film was highly regarded when it came out and is considered a great contributor (alongside Akira and Ghost in the Shell) to adult anime’s popularity in the West. (That’s at least true for the Wachowskis, who cited the film as a big influence on The Matrix, and later brought on Kawajiri to direct and write two segments of The Animatrix.) [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrfUIekIpEA[/embed] In the years since Ninja Scroll’s release, it’s become a bit of a franchise unto itself: it had a standalone sequel series in 2003 and a 12-issue miniseries in 2006 by J. Torres and Michael Chang Ting Yu.
Animation studio Madhouse announced a sequel in 2008 helmed by Kawajiri that stalled out, and that same year saw Warner Bros. announce a live-action movie that also didn’t go anywhere. (Oh, noooooo, that’s sooooooo sad.) Tickets for the Ninja Scroll re-release will go on sale in the coming weeks. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Ninja #Scroll #Slashing #Theaters #OctoberNinja Scroll,Yoshiaki Kawajiri ‘Ninja Scroll’ Is Slashing Back to Theaters in October
The 1993 samurai anime film Ninja Scroll is coming back with a limited theatrical run this fall. Per IGN, Iconic Events and AMC are teaming for a re-release on October 4, 5, and 7. (At time of writing, it’s exclusively locked to North America.) The remastered version will play its original 35mm negatives in 4K using a process that “repairs any damage and [performs] color correction to create an archival-quality digital master of the film.” Directed and written by Yoshiaki Kawajiri and created by Animate Film, Ninja Scroll tells the story of mercenary swordsman Kibagamei Jubei. Set in feudal Japan, Jubei is tasked with killing the Eight Devils of Kimon, supernatural ninjas aiming to take over the Tokugawa shogunate. Praised for its animation and action, the film was highly regarded when it came out and is considered a great contributor (alongside Akira and Ghost in the Shell) to adult anime’s popularity in the West. (That’s at least true for the Wachowskis, who cited the film as a big influence on The Matrix, and later brought on Kawajiri to direct and write two segments of The Animatrix.) [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrfUIekIpEA[/embed] In the years since Ninja Scroll’s release, it’s become a bit of a franchise unto itself: it had a standalone sequel series in 2003 and a 12-issue miniseries in 2006 by J. Torres and Michael Chang Ting Yu.
Animation studio Madhouse announced a sequel in 2008 helmed by Kawajiri that stalled out, and that same year saw Warner Bros. announce a live-action movie that also didn’t go anywhere. (Oh, noooooo, that’s sooooooo sad.) Tickets for the Ninja Scroll re-release will go on sale in the coming weeks. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Ninja #Scroll #Slashing #Theaters #OctoberNinja Scroll,Yoshiaki Kawajiri](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/ninja-scroll-hed-1280x853.jpg)
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