postarchitectural

I went back to New York a couple weeks ago, and staying in DUMBO while trying to pretend I lived in Williamsburg again put the subway back on my mind [and brought back memories of my commute to DUMBO, taking the J in to Essex then the F back out to York].

Then a couple days after I got back, I saw Mike Frumin’s post Spark It Up. It’s pretty gorgeous, and tells a lot of little fascinating stories, but what really tickled me was the fat spreadsheet of MTA ridership data Frumin used to create the map.

My first thought was to do something like my mapping of spending in the city — that sea of sparklines just demanded a z-axis. But I wanted to be able to scrub back and forth in time, so I started working on a ModestMaps-powered map with a time slider. After getting the data into the right shape, it was pretty quick to get something simple but interactive and visual up.

Some of the immediate things I realized, scrubbing back and forth in time, was just how high ridership used to be in the 1940s and 1950s, though significant changes like the token to Metrocard / Unlimited Metrocard seem to be affecting ridership. Here’s an atrophied 1977 vs 2006:

I can’t say much more about the data than Frumin’s original post, but it is pretty great to watch Midtown act as the throbbing heart of Manhattan, and the various lines spidering out into the Bronx.

After getting great feedback from my awesome coworkers at Stamen, I added some context to the time slider and some tooltips that feel about right to my eyes [writing the MTABadge class was especially fun]. Also, I set up a relative scaling mode, where all stations are scaled relative to their respective maximums. This gives you the Williamsburg boom that’s otherwise dwarfed by the volume of Midtown traffic.

The current piece is up now, here.