Transportation Options in NYC

New York City

By Matthew Roosa
transportation, census, new york,

Looking into types of options people have depending on where they live, what part of the city is full of different modes of transportation and what part is not. Also looking into census tract to identify some of the relationship between travel time, method of commuting with the transportation options depending on where people live.

This project looks into types of options people have depending on where they live, what part of the city is full of different modes of transportation and what part is not. Also looking into census tract to identify some of the relationship between travel time, method of commuting with the transportation options depending on where people live. Main point that I wanted to show with this project is although New York City is one of the largest and richest city in the world, there are areas within the city where people have little access to public and private transportations. Population is naturally concentrated along the subway lines, where housing prices typically become a little more expensive. The rise in private companies offering transportation service has expanded the options of transportation to get New York City residents to go car free, lowering car ownership within some parts of the city such as the waterfronts of Brooklyn and Queens. There are still areas in the city where people prefer to drive to work for different reasons. I did not look into any particular study to cite the reason, but I assumed there are relations between people driving to work and the type of other transportation methods they have.

New York City Subway System has the highest number of stations in the world. Most of the stations were built in the early 20th century before the MTA was formed in the 60s, and updating the infrastructure has become a crucial part of maintaining the subway system. So it’s great that there are more than 470 stations throughout the city making it easier for people to walk and take public transit wherever they are going, but what if you have trouble walking, or can not walk at all? There are only 106 within the entire subway system that are ADA accessible. This means for people that have a hard time going up the stairs, or can not go up the stairs it significantly decreases the option of taking the subway from A to B.

Although the subway system has limited accessibility, there are other transportation options within the city. The city’s bus systems are rapidly replacing its fleets to more accessible and cleaner vehicles. I’ve also included options of private transportation methods to show the difference number of options people have when it comes to deciding which mode of transportation they want to take.

Working with census data, although the census provides you with numerous interesting data, it was hard to try to identify which data were really useful for my project. For example, if I was looking for people’s commuting method by census tract, the answer added up biking and motorcycle together, which was not very helpful when I wanted to see the difference between people biking (cycling) to work to driving or taking public transit to work.

It also has created some empty areas when joining tracts, which I could not figure out why it has happened.

This made it harder to visualize some of the things I wanted to, and could alter the perception of the data for people. Also, getting the right metrics to get the right message across was a challenge as well. I’ve tried to incorporate as much tools we covered in class as I could such as heatmaps, I would still need more practice to be able to fully take advantage.

Overall, I hoped to show the inequality in transportation options throughout the city without taking any other demographic data into consideration, although it plays a strong role in it, I wanted to focus on the infrastructure.