Introduction

For Carto Lab, I visualized the subway station entrances in New York City. Subway is the most common mode of transportation for many people in NYC, it was something that I could relate to (since I use it everyday). I wanted to get an overview of how well the city is connected by the subways, how many stations are there in a particular area and what type of train line (service) they provide. I found the dataset on NYC OpenData website, which I then transferred to Carto. This dataset had the name of the subway stations and the lines that were there.

Method

For reference, I looked at few subway maps but in many of these maps, subway stations were not visible properly- it was too small to see and anyone could get confused. My aim was create something with which one could easily find the subway station and also get all the information regarding the train line that was available there. I found few images online that resonated what I wanted to create- the images shows the name of the stations and lines available very clearly.

As I started making my first map, I just had the subway stations on it without any train routes or any information regarding the lines. I wanted to make the map interactive so I added the hover and click feature for map, where one could see the name (also gives you the address) of the station and line that is available. My next step was to color the station with color of the line, but soon I realised that this won’t be possible since most stations had more than one lines (of different color) and it didn’t make sense. Further, I was trying all the features that were available to make the map more useful and finally I found a map that had different subway lines along with different colors drawn on it. I added the name of stations on the map and it was now making sense.

Next, I wanted to understand how the stations were being used. I applied the aggregation feature to map and you could now see the density of stations in a particular area. As seen in picture below, yellow square shows maximum stations in an area- one of them is seen in Lower Manhattan, where most of the offices are situated. It totally make sense, this area has to be very well connected to other places, so people could reach there easily. There are many light green squares near the tourist areas, places where there are lots of people visiting- again there are all major lines present at these places, making it accessible.

Future

I want to explore other features of Carto, which I was not able to use here. I plan to take some other dataset and explore these features and derive some analyses from it.