Introduction
I was looking for data via the NYC Open Data portal and saw data bicycle lanes and routes – and that piqued my interest. As I thought about it more, I was very curious to see where bike and subway stations overlap and where they do not. I was curious to learn more about how the mode of bicycle transportation might be used compared to other transportation options. It’s not frequent you see someone using their bicycle within Manhattan to commute, for example. The curiosity of transportation took on a life of its own, and as I added some transportation displays on the map I became interested in viewing all other modes of transportation, such as bus stops and sidewalks.
I was also curious to see how bus stops overlapped or did not overlap with bicycle lanes/routes, and subways.
Some questions I sought to answer: Who might benefit most from bicycle routes/lanes? And buses? How convenient is it to ride bicycles over other modes of transportation?
Data & Methodology
I used NYC Open Data & MTA sources to obtain Shapefiles:
I used Shapefiles and layered each separate transportation data file accordingly using the QGIS tool. I utilized the Census Tract file that is used as a map structure.
Findings
Bike Lanes/Routes
There is quite a lot of overlap between bike lanes and routes and subway stops. We can see though that the bike mode of transportation is more accessible than subways.
We can also see how bicycle lanes or routes are much better for cross town commuting, as many New Yorkers would understand how inaccessible subways are for this. However, according to a NYC Department of Transportation’s Citywide Mobility Survey, only about 1% of people use bicycles as modes of transportation, with 30% of people walking or using transit (PSB, 2018). I would be interested in seeing recent data, given the bike boom that our culture saw during the pandemic (Lindsey, 2021).
Interestingly, Staten Island has bike routes/lanes despite not having any subway lines. This would entail that this borough commutes within primarily via car. Seeing that the lanes are mostly along the coast lines, it makes me think that the bike access is mainly done for recreational purposes.
Similarly Long Island, specifically the South Fork area, has more options for transportation via bike routes compared to subway access. I would imagine these are also used recreationally rather than for commuting purposes (the beach is located there).
Bicycle parking is widely accessible along the bike routes or lanes, specifically in Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens. The south of Brooklyn has a lot more bicycle parking than nearby routes or lanes. It makes me presume that more people own bikes there and used to commute shorter distances between different bicycle racks or to nearby subway stations. Also means that people with bikes in those areas without lanes need to ride their bikes in areas without lanes/routes, which is more dangerous, until they reach the bike route. It would be interesting to understand: why do certain areas don’t have accessible bicycle lanes?
Finally, we can also see bike lanes available in different parks, like Prospect Park for example, which would be used for recreational purposes.
Bus Stops
I was astounded to see the transportation access through buses across all five boroughs. It was really cool to see how accessible this public transportation option is, and honestly reminded me that this is a very viable mode of transportation within the city.
There are even bus stops in parks, like the one in Staten Island and several parks in Queens. We can also see bus access to the JFK airport (something new that I learned).
Sidewalks
Most of us know NYC is an extremely walkable city. I was curious to see what the sidewalk access was across the entire city. Staten Island doesn’t show as many sidewalks in comparison to Manhattan or Brooklyn. However, if we were to look at a reference map, we can see that Staten Island has a lot more parks and open areas with more trees and nature, and that is why there aren’t sidewalks in those areas.
I concluded that most of the spaces without sidewalks can be attributed to parks, recreational areas, or facilities (airports).
Despite visualizing all these modes of transportation, through online research, aside from my anecdotal experience, I found that the city saw an increase in car owners during the pandemic, given the safety concerns of riding public transportation (Szymkowski, 2021). As our NYC society begins to feel safe again to ride public transportation, I’ll be curious if transportation choices change in the near future (most likely shown in survey data).
Reflection & Self-Critique
One thing I realized during my analysis is that a lot of the findings required some basic knowledge of the city. Since I have been in the area for almost a decade, I was able to use my experiential knowledge to get a sense of the areas that have more or less transportation options.
Additionally, I found it was difficult to get data from the same year given my different sourcing of data. I don’t think it was that important for this particular visualization I was portraying, but it’s something I wanted to communicate to the audience.
If I were to continue with this visualization project, I would look at another city’s bicycle routes, such as San Francisco. From my experience, people spend a lot more time doing outdoor activities, so I would be interested in seeing how that would compare to transport accessibility in NYC. Additionally, I was trying to find vehicle ownership data but had difficulty finding a good data set. It would have been interesting to see the amount of cars people have per borough which would also give a better idea of how people commute or transport.
As far as the QGIS tool, I thought that the concept of “layers” in QGIS is similar to Adobe Illustrator, so I already had established a mental model for this concept. However, I found QGIS clunky in terms of usability, and found it difficult to play around with visualizations on the fly. When changing things on the fly then realizing I didn’t want to keep those changes, I manually had to re-enter all the prior selections and colors to return back to my prior selections. It would have been nice if the tool remembered the options chosen from the past selection, instead. Because of these usability issues, I found the tool a little frustrating and inefficient to use. Aside from that, I think that creating a map visual with this tool is somewhat easy once you have all the data you need.
References
Elango, V. (2021, June 20). Who owns a car in New York City? Venkatesh Elango. Retrieved April 12, 2023, from https://wellango.github.io/posts/2021/06/who-owns-cars-in-nyc/
Lindsey, J. (2021, January 16). The Pandemic Bike Boom Is Here to Stay. Outside Magazine. Retrieved April 12, 2023, from https://www.outsideonline.com/2420131/pandemic-bike-boom-here-stay/
PSB. (2018, November). NYC DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION. NYC.gov. Retrieved April 12, 2023, from https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/nycdot-citywide-mobility-survey-report-2018.pdf
Szymkowski, S. (2021, January 5). New York car ownership jumps nearly 40% as pandemic creates mass transit worries. CNET. Retrieved April 15, 2023, from https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/new-york-car-ownership-jumps-nearly-40-as-pandemic-creates-mass-transit-worries/Warren, T. (2021, August 15). What Will New York Do With Their New Cars? Car and Driver. Retrieved April 15, 2023, from https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a37293032/what-will-new-york-do-with-the-cars-they-purchased-during-the-pandemic/