Background

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected people’s day-to-day lives, especially how people got to work. With lockdowns policies in place, people had to adjust to the new normal of working from home or in a hybrid setting. I was curious about how New Yorkers got to work in the years before and during the pandemic, especially since New York has multiple forms of public transportation such as the subway, buses, and the ferry. I also wanted to better understand the prevalence of people working from home over the last few years in New York, and visualize these changes.

Materials

Dataset:

I used American Community Survey Data from Social Explorer. Social Explorer compiles data from the census and other sources to display demographic information in the form of interactive data maps. 

Software:

I used Microsoft Excel to clean up and refine my data and Datawrapper to create my visualizations.

Methods

Selecting and Refining Data:

I selected American Community Survey data concerning means of transportation to work for workers 16 years and over from 2019-2021. I wanted to take a look at the data by census tracts, but the 2021 census tract data isn’t available yet, so I decided to use county data instead. I downloaded county data for the five boroughs of New York from 2019-2021 as CSV files and used Excel to remove unnecessary columns to focus on the means of transportation for each borough.

Data Visualization:

As I downloaded data over three years, I wanted to start by visualizing transportation across the boroughs for each year before zeroing in on how many people worked from home.

I chose a bar chart to visualize the amount of people that used each form of transportation to get to work. Specifically, I opted for a stacked bar chart with horizontal bars to illustrate and compare the proportion of people from each borough for each mode of transportation. This was an easier way of easily determining which means of transportation were most popular overall in New York from year to year, and also allowed me to identify the boroughs that tended to prefer certain transportation methods. 

I refined my visualizations by adding thicker bars and separating lines to help distinguish each mode of transportation better. In addition, I sorted the bars to ensure that the means of transportation were in descending order from top to bottom, such that the most popular mode of transportation would be at the top and the least popular would be at the bottom. I used the ColorBrewer 2.0 Set3 color palette to color-code each borough with a specific color to keep the visualizations consistent from chart to chart and allow viewers to easily compare the data. 

After creating charts detailing transportation throughout the five boroughs from 2019-2021, I had a much better understanding of how people from each borough traveled to work over the course of the pandemic.

Next, I created a fourth chart to visualize the number of New Yorkers that worked from home. I opted for another bar chart, and chose the grouped column chart to group all the five boroughs together for each year to allow for easy comparison. I decided to order the columns chronologically by starting with 2019 and ending with 2021 to show the change over time in working from home, and to order the boroughs in ascending order for each year. I chose a blue color palette, with the darkest color representing the borough with the greatest amount of people working from home.

Results and Interpretation

After making my charts, I started to see patterns in my visualizations. I was surprised to learn that public transportation and driving are equally popular in Queens, such that the amount of people driving to work actually surpassed the amount of people taking public transportation to work in 2021.

It was also interesting to see that the number of New Yorkers working from home didn’t increase too much from 2019 to 2020, but increased drastically in 2021 as more companies allowed their employees to work from home. I was shocked to learn that the number of New Yorkers working from home in 2021 was very close to the number who drove to work each day, though I wasn’t too surprised that those who take public transportation to work are still at the top.

I also learned that while the number of people working from home at least tripled in all five boroughs, the number actually increased by a little over a factor of 6 in Staten Island, with Queens and Brooklyn slightly behind. It was surprising to see that the number of people working from home increased the most proportionally in Staten Island, and how Brooklyn had the greatest number of people working from home in 2021.

Reflection

Visualizing the number of New Yorkers who worked from home over the last three years was very intriguing. I learned a lot about how New Yorkers got to work and how those means of transportation changed with the pandemic. I had a great experience learning how to use Datawrapper as a visualization tool; I think Datawrapper was very easy to use, and I appreciate the amount of customizations that it offers. I will definitely be keeping this tool in my arsenal for future data analytics and research projects. 

If I were to continue working on this project, I would want to use census tract data in my visualizations rather than county data to gain a better understanding of the neighborhoods in each borough where people tend to work from home the most. I think it would also be valuable to incorporate data from 2022 into my visualizations after that data is released. With some companies now announcing a return to the office as well as masks no longer being required for public transportation, I think it could be enlightening to see how many New Yorkers worked from home in 2022 and whether it is a significant difference compared to 2021.