Students from Northeastern’s Toronto and Vancouver campuses took part in a hackathon to predict traffic patterns that could paralyze the city.

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Taylor Swift will perform six shows in Toronto over the next two weeks, marking the tail end of her Eras tour. Her presence also marks “trouble, trouble, trouble” – as the singer once sang – for the city’s traffic situation.

Toronto’s traffic congestion gets so bad during events that Irish singer and former One Direction star Niall Horan had to abandon his car and walk to the venue for his own show this summer after being caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic ended up.

But Northeastern and its students want to change this. The university recently hosted a hackathon for students on the Toronto and Vancouver campuses, where they were challenged with analyzing data from a previous Lady Gaga concert to predict traffic flow during Swift shows that could be used to track traffic for events to help reduce.

The winning team of students from Northeastern’s Vancoucer campus found through analysis that concertgoers tend to arrive in Toronto through a concentrated area, but then disperse as they leave. This information could help the city manage future events, said Yvonne Leung, an assistant professor of analytics who helped organize the event.

“We could use the data to predict how people move and provide real-time insight to help the city manage traffic,” Leung said. “We can understand how people move at different dates, times or events.”

The winning team collected the data of people’s movements during events and used a web-based interactive computing platform, Jupyter Notebook, to generate coordinates to accurately determine where exactly people moved. They then created charts in Infogram, a web-based interactive visualization platform, to illustrate the data in an easy-to-understand way.

The winning team of three, all master’s students from Vancouver’s computer science program, said they wanted to participate because the hackathon offered a good way to learn practical skills like GIS mapping.

“We just wanted to be involved and I thought this hackathon was for good (because) it contributes to local communities,” said Hao Niu, a third-year computer science student in Vancouver.

Niu was paired with fellow Vancouver students Panxin “Claire” Lu, a third-year computer science master’s student, and Zheng Gu, a second-year computer science master’s student. None of the students knew each other before, but met to work on the problem in person.

The group said they learned how to use GIS, a computer system that analyzes and displays geographic information. The day-long hackathon gave them the opportunity to learn these new skills and then apply them to the challenge.

“We had some pretty good ideas before we got the data,” Lu said. “After we received the data, we checked it and tried to visualize it on the maps.”