Deploy and Host NYC Bus-Lane Corridors on Railway

NYC Bus-Lane Corridors is an interactive CARTO + deck.gl map that shows, for Manhattan's 5 busiest bus-only-lane routes, how bus speed, trip time, and ridership changed before vs. after the lane. Ride each route end-to-end (a "before-lane" point races an "after-lane" point), scrub the trip, and read Apache ECharts panels — all streaming live from CARTO. Themed for the Spatial Data Science Conference (New York, Oct 20–21, 2026).

About Hosting NYC Bus-Lane Corridors

It's a static Vite + React single-page app. Railway builds it with npm run build and serves the compiled dist/ with vite preview on the injected $PORT (config in railway.json). There is no backend and no database — the app talks directly to the CARTO Maps + Widget APIs from the browser using a referer-locked public token, so hosting is just a small static web service. A public domain is generated automatically on deploy.

Why Deploy NYC Bus-Lane Corridors on Railway

Railway builds straight from the GitHub repo, injects the CARTO configuration as environment variables at build time (Vite inlines them), gives you a public HTTPS domain out of the box, and redeploys on every push. No Dockerfile or server code to maintain — set six variables and deploy.

Common Use Cases

A conference / demo map showing the measurable impact of bus-priority lanes.
A template for any CARTO + deck.gl before/after spatial story driven by warehouse tables.
A reference for pulling CARTO tables into deck.gl with a public, referer-locked API access token.

Dependencies for NYC Bus-Lane Corridors

A CARTO account with the three source tables (*_routes, *_lanes, *_monthly) in your data warehouse.
A CARTO API Access Token — read-only, scoped (sql,maps) to those tables, and referer-locked to your Railway domain. See CARTO's docs: API access tokens.

Deployment Dependencies

Set these service variables when deploying:

Variable	What it is
`VITE_CARTO_API_BASE`	Your CARTO region API base, e.g. `https://gcp-us-east1.api.carto.com`
`VITE_CARTO_CONNECTION`	CARTO connection name, e.g. `carto_dw`
`VITE_CARTO_TOKEN`	CARTO API Access Token (public, read-only, referer-locked to your Railway domain)
`VITE_ROUTES_TABLE`	Route-shapes table (fully-qualified name)
`VITE_LANES_TABLE`	Bus-lane table (fully-qualified name)
`VITE_MONTHLY_TABLE`	Monthly-speed table (fully-qualified name)

Create the token with your Railway domain as the referer, e.g.:

carto credentials create token --connection carto_dw \
  --source  \
  --source  \
  --source  \
  --apis sql,maps --referers 'https://.up.railway.app*'

Source & docs: https://github.com/gabrielAHN/nyc-bus-corridors-app