Inequality and Mass Transit in the Bay Area
dangrover.github.io
dangrover.github.io
I'm not sure what they are supposed to show. It seems to show me that there's very little relationship between income and mass transit service.
I'm confused as to what I'm meant to glean from this data.
data certainly do not have preconceived notions, but i dont think that is your point.
people are not supposed to draw conclusions from data? that sounds like exactly what people are supposed to do, if they are to survive.
is your point that humans are biased towards certain results? that does not follow from your earlier two points ("Data aren't supposed to..." and "Sure, but you're not 'supposed' to...").
why do you think humans are biased towards "positive" results?
> I'm not sure what they are supposed to show.
In other words, "in the context of what argument are you presenting this data?" Throwaway is saying that the person presenting the data needn't have an intended conclusion; it doesn't need to be part of an argument at all. It's OK, in fact preferred, for it just to be data from which you can draw conclusions, or decide there are no interesting conclusions to draw.
The primary questions of good science are what, where, when, and who. These are the questions you answer when you collect data. Once you've answered them you can address secondary questions of why and how. Asking why and how without giving priority to what, where, when, and who is putting the cart before the horse.
When you are unable to answer why and how for a given set of data, it is not meaningless. Rather, the lack of correlation or explanations just says that perhaps we need to look into this more deeply. "I've looked at the data and I don't know" is a profound statement, and it can be inspiring.
Science also has to be falsifiable, and effectively that's what these graphs do, at least as far as extrapolating from the NY study goes.
I agree it would have been more helpful if the author had presented conclusions about what the data mean or don't mean, but they aren't a priori meaningless simply because there isn't a visible correlation. No correlation, which is the rather obvious conclusion, is just as meaningful. I hope this is more clear.
What do the transit vs. income graphs for SF look like?
How do the SF graphs compare to the NY ones?
Is there a clustering of rich and poor stops in SF like there is in NY?
And then finally, what are the possible explanations?
Sure, they didn't answer the last question, and you have to inspect the data to answer the second and third ones, but it's okay to provide data for other people to look at.
Surely if the first question was worth answering for NY, it's worth answering for SF. You don't answer questions simply because you expect to find something, you answer them because you're curious.
Do you know the story about Richard Feynman and the wobbling plate in the cafeteria? It's another question that "nobody wanted to answer".
Look, I'm wording myself badly today, let me try again. The question of 'is there a correlation' is worth answering but ONLY because a correlation is plausible. If you are graphing data to apply to a PLAUSIBLE hypothesis, then your work is reasonable. But if you are instead graphing random junk without any reason, you are wasting everyone's time. Data needs to cause some kind of mental connection in the viewer. That is a VERY low bar to meet. This article meets it. But not all theoretical articles do.
No conclusion is not necessarily a conclusion. Data doesn't have meaning but showing people data should have meaning.
http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html
But otherwise, I think we basically agree. Mostly I thought you were talking about the SF vs. NY thing and this article, not about inane investigations into arbitrary correlations (e.g., Is there a relationship between the number of steps someone takes per day and the number of spoons in their apartment? - well, actually, there probably is, especially if you start taking away knives and forks too). The most important thing I guess is to have a question that the researcher is interested in answering.
you are saying that a fair conclusion is "there is no clear relationship between transit and income in the bay area", which could be the conclusions the authors were drawing (i think it's not clear exactly what conclusion if any they drew).
i actually was not thinking about it correctly in retrospect. i saw the nyc graph and i thought "manhattan = rich, everywhere else = poor". i saw these graphs and i thought "don't see anything". i assumed the conclusion from the nyc graphs was superior, because there was a clear positive relationship there. you are saying that the "don't see anything" conclusion is just as valid, even though it is not a positive relationship.
i (now) agree with you.
Ignoring inconclusive/negative data is only problematic if it contradicts the data you choose to act on.
Talking about what didn't work is good because it stops other people from repeating failed experiments.
Finally, in this case, it does contradict the NY study.
Income and wealth aren't the same thing, but they are highly correlated.
No they are not.
According to the US Treasury:
"These low realized rates of return call into serious question the use of realized income from capital as part of any measure of well-being or ability-to-pay. For owners of capital, economic income may have little relationship to realized income, and rates of realization may vary according to the assets they hold."
According to the Federal Reserve:
"...very wealthy people try quite hard to minimize their income."
[1] http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/tax-analy...
[2] http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/scf/files/wealthin...
See table 5 (pg. 36) here, which shows both net worth by income percentile, and income by net worth percentile, to see the strong relationship between being high-net-worth and high-income: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2009/200913/200913pa...
Example numbers: the top 1% of 2007 income-earners held 26% of U.S. wealth, and the top 1% of households by net worth in 2006 earned 16% of the year's income. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% of income-earners held only 14% of U.S. wealth, and the bottom 50% by net worth earned only 22% of U.S. income. The general trend holds in the in-between categories as well: the 95-99th percentile of incomes hold about twice as much wealth as the 90-95th percentile, etc.
So the relationship is not perfect, but taking the groups in aggregate, higher-income-earners control considerably more wealth than lower-income-earners. Some of the later figures in the document explicitly plot some ratios.
But they actually own 26% of American assets, twenty-six times the amount you'd expect in the uncorrelated case! The top 1% of Americans by income own a full quarter of all the country's assets— stocks, bonds, real-estate, etc. That seems like a pretty strong relationship.
This doesn't mean that having a high income means you are wealthy, as you suggest, but that they are correlated.
So you agree with me then?
The easiest formula to build wealth is to have positive result to the income -expenses equation. If you accept that, income and expenses should be the two strongest correlations to large amounts of wealth overall.
Considering expenses need to be something north of zero in the best case and income has no upper bound, I'd give income the edge over the two in terms of overall strongest factor.
[1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/11/07/the-rising-age-gap...
I'm not sure how that translates into an argument either for or against high income correlating to high wealth.
We're all using the same variables for time.
Aside from that though, the two should never be conflated. Many people are able to create wealth with small to moderate incomes, while higher income doesn't mean higher wealth if you also have high expenses.
Certainly, they are very different things, and individual variance can be high, but they are definitely strongly correlated in the population at large.
This I don't quite agree with. Overall it makes sense but it is not as direct a correlation.
Wealth gives you leverage, but only by the weakest of factors can it give you higher income directly. There would always be some sort of intermediate step. There are few ways you can transform wealth directly into income without significant work. (At that point it becomes less a factor of the wealth directly and more you earning an income.)
Eg. You are born wealthy and because of that your father knows a lot of people willing to give you an opportunity that a person not born wealthy wouldn't have. This only works if you aren't an idiot, or an alcoholic, etc. If you are, the chances of you turning your own wealth into income which you can then convert back into more wealth is significantly hampered compared to someone without these issues but less starting wealth. If you aren't putting work and effort into exploiting the leverage that wealth provides, you will not create income.
The difference in lifetime earning between two people, both of whom have a high five figure or low six figure income and good growth potential, one of whom has $150,000 in student loan debt, is not very large.
Housing debt isn't relevant unless to wealth unless the house in question is underwater.
If you start at a $120,000/yr job at 22 and retire at 65, with increases of 2% a year, you will earn ~$8.3 million nominal over the course of your career.
If you start at a $250,000/yr job at age 30 and retire at 65 , with increases of 2% a year, you will earn ~13 million nominal over the course of your career. That doesn't include the (modest) pay during the second half of medical training.
The estimated cost of attendance for the most expensive medical schools top out at around $60,000 a year for four years. Assuming you meet the requirements, the federal government will lend you $40,000 of that at 6.8% and the rest at 8.5%. If nothing is paid off until after one's residency, that means our doctor would be starting his career with $330,500 in debt and a $250,000 salary.
Meanwhile our petroleum engineer(?) would be earning $140,600 at that point. If the doctor put away the difference every year until his debt was paid off, it would take less than four years.
My basic point in the great-great grandparent post is that bellyaching of the form I'm not really rich because of X, usually doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Likewise, many of us would be unable to pick out many/most of the Millionaires Next Door in a pinch.
They are not equal.
"I'm not wealthy! I spend my entire (large) income every month!" is a profoundly silly thing to say.
When person B has $10,000 he is wealthier than person A.
If person B spends $10,000 he is losing wealth. Depending on how he spends his 10,000, this may result in an overall net gain in his wealth (i.e., an investment, like buying a house) or an overall net loss to his wealth (i.e. a purchase, like buying a car, since cars depreciate).
Your wealth is an overall assessment of what you have accumulated. Your wealth is the sum of your current position + (revenue - expenses). Note that your current position can be negative regardless of how many cars, boats and homes you are entitled to use at the moment. This is the situation of many, many Americans at this time.
Your income, on the other hand, is simply the revenue. A relatively tiny part of the equation.
So it is entirely true that you can have a high income and little to no wealth. While it might seem silly to you from the perspective of someone that is looking at the use of possessions, depreciating or overly-leveraged positions make the statement a perfectly normal thing to say.
You might envy the house, but if that house is unable to be leveraged because more is owed to the bank than it is worth, it is actually a net loss when trying to determine wealth. A renter is actually better off than this homeowner.
Once you understand this, you'll realize that even with a low income, maximizing wealth creation opportunities is what pays off in the end.
"Once you understand this, you'll realize that even with a low income, maximizing wealth creation opportunities is what pays off in the end."
This is another one of those silly things that people with large incomes say a lot. People making minimum wage will never, ever, ever be able to save at a rate high enough to make any sort of difference. Parables about hard work and austerity are fun, but they miss the point.
And besides, you're just completely missing the point. Of course you'll be poor if you blow all your money. Who said otherwise? The point is that it's pretty silly to say at the beginning of each month, "I'm struggling just as much as everybody else" based on the fact that you're about to spend all that you've earned on luxury goods and services.
Let's keep in mind here that you were the one that introduced a "good/bad" evaluation into the discussion with your comparison of people against each other. I made no such comparison. I'm not choosing to critique a person's life choices, I'm simply explaining how wealth and income, although correlated, are not the same thing.
You are equating both "lots of stuff" and "lots of income" with wealth, and that is an improper view of the matter.
It's silly to argue about how the $10k/month is grown or spent.
Except that this balance between the products of the equation will make all the difference in the world to the end result - wealth. What is irrelevant is the dollar amount. What matters is how the equation is balanced.
It's still several thousand dollars a month more than someone below the poverty line!
While true, this is largely irrelevant to this overall picture. The equation remains. We can address a minimum expense expectation overall as a society, but that's a different topic, and we have already established some hard lines. The basic fact is that if your income is less than your expenses, you are becoming less wealthy. What the person next door is doing is not important. Wealth is not a zero sum game! The neighbour having a ferrari does not detract from your ability to earn an extra $10K. It doesn't matter to you at all, really. If he is complaining because he cannot afford that expense, he has the same issue as the person that is complaining they can't buy an xbox.
People making minimum wage will never, ever, ever be able to save at a rate high enough to make any sort of difference.
I hate this bullshit. Why? Because I did it, and I came from far worse circumstances than 70-80% of the people that have this defeatist attitude.
That's that bit about investment I was mentioning. I won't lie, it isn't easy to live on minimum wage. It's even harder to work at that level where you are deemed "taxable" but can't really afford anything. That's why you invest. You look to change the numbers in the equation to create a situation where you can build wealth. You put yourself in a position where you earn more and spend less, and then you do that for a decent period of time.
you're about to spend all that you've earned on luxury goods and services.
What's a luxury? Your shoes? Your beer? Your cigarettes? Your fast food lunch? Your Honda? Your cable tv? Your boat? Your house? Your Ferrari? Your private jet? Your island? This is entirely dependent on perspective, and thus, for the most part, irrelevant.
In reality, the poor overspend just as foolishly as the middle class and rich do. Only the nature and amount of the luxuries change. Not being able to afford a pack of smokes or cable TV is exactly the same as not being able to afford a boat or a second car. Either way, you can't afford it, so if you want to enjoy these things, you need to get yourself into a position where you can afford it.
It's meaningless and unproductive to compare a person overextending themselves on their McMansion to a person overextending themselves on McNuggets. The solution is the same - adjust the equation. EVERYONE can adjust the equation. EVERYONE can live cheaper than they do right now. EVERYONE can earn more than they do right now. The only difference between us all is that some of us will sacrifice to achieve these goals and some of us won't. Regrettably, one thing the poor do share is that most of them fall into the latter.
And that's where I remind you that I'm not a total douche and won't be following Ron Paul of the ideological cliff. Social programs and safety nets are tremendously important. It is essential that as many people as possible are allowed to find themselves in a position where effort and sacrifice are rewarded. It's essential that as many people as possible understand what I just said to be a viable path. Personally, if you are American, I feel there is work to be done in your nation in this respect. For me as a Canadian, I think we've more than covered off this level of support. Anything further is up to the people in the mirrors.
If anything, this transit/income data shows how little of a correlation there is between the two. This doesn't suprise me: most people in SF have cars, and muni/BART are embarrassingly awful compared to the big the cities in the US.
cities ==> city
The only big city in the USA with decent transit is NYC. San Francisco is comparable to Boston, DC, and Chicago and far ahead of LA, Dallas, and Miami.
By world standards, NYC is barely average and the rest of the country has no transit system at all to speak of.
I can count NYC as barely average only because the peer group includes not only London, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo, and Osaka but also Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, Istanbul, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires. If I'd just used your list, NYC would be dead last in almost every category.
The CTA is not. It's barely tolerable (and by tolerable, I mean that people are even capable of using it to get around and/or commute at all. So, the system might technically be a functioning transit apparatus, but barely.) I've used it daily for a sizable portion of my life, and it fails with remarkable consistency.
As an example, since (August?) of 2005, Atherton only has weekend and special event caltrain service. You could argue that shouldn't be surprising given the graph (median income of ~$193K), but it's still an important piece of missing information.
It would have been nice to see a graph based on total number of stops scheduled for a station overlaid with the median household income as it is currently graphed for caltrain.
Click the Caltrain 'Local' route and see for yourself. I had to double-check it since it seemed so implausible to me, but it seems to be roughly accurate.
A data science friend of mine said we should do a "watershed" model where we define an area where people flow into a stop, but I'm not sure how best to do that! Maybe someone smart can fork the project and improve on our methods.
[1] http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?services=da76d...
There's a big exploratory component, where they investigate possible approaches and try and find something interesting they can show.
On the one hand, you want some significant features and relationships that exist in the data to be apparent to any intelligent reader who spends a little time studying your visualization.
On the other hand, you don't want to distort the data, or impose an interpretation on it that isn't warranted.
For a well-done visualization, there is definitely a lot more work going into the final product than simply plotting some dimensions against some other dimensions.
As an example, the New York Times pours a lot of money (and therefore talent and person-hours) into their visualization work. Some of the behind-the-scenes of that operation is blogged about here: http://chartsnthings.tumblr.com/
I've lived(NYC, Philly & more)in and been in many cities across the US and never witnessed this on such a scale/epidemic.
It made me wonder what the government is doing there to help with what I see as an epidemic?
"The city of San Francisco, California, due to its mild climate and its social programs that have provided cash payments for homeless individuals, is often considered the homelessness capital of the United States"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...
One of the things I find most surprising is the data on the bus lines. I'd assumed, as a recent LA transplant, that the bus lines would generally serve worse off neighborhoods (it is always thus in LA; minority and lower income neighborhoods get mediocre bus service, while wealthier neighborhoods get expresses and light rail).
Of course, it would be interesting to overlay the stops of the various corporate buses on top of this information. My guess is all those high points have private alternatives serving them.
Final point: this might be best for the questions it raises. How does service compare across lines? How many people does a line move and how fast? How much is the line getting subsidized (BART, I'm guessing, crushes the others in that regard).
The trick with San Francisco is that because of the buckshot nature of public housing developments in the city, poor areas as mixed in surprisingly evenly with wealthy areas. This creates a lot of negative effects for residents - the expensive and trendy Hayes Valley for example, is right next door to an extremely high-crime area, the Western Addition. Keep going a bit further and you hit the Fillmore, which is again a wealthy, trendy area.
SF does this at micro-scale. In a given neighborhood there can be extremely good blocks that are directly next to extremely bad blocks. It's not hard to walk 300 feet and end up in a completely different-seeming universe.
One thing that's interesting to note is that SF buses stop very often, so the highs and lows aren't really spread across a large geographic distance, they are often separate only by a block or two. The "cliffs" in the graph really are that steep when you project it onto a map.
The visualization does show drastic transitions but the majority of them seem to be the buses crossing the seedier areas of downtown which are, indeed, quite seedy.
You'll notice the Tenderloin (a high crime area) has its own station partitioned off from the rest of the districts. The others are also interesting. The Mission station for instance, serves a really broad community which includes both the Mission District (currently undergoing gentrification) and the Castro (gentrification complete). On the other hand, districts like Bayview, Ingleside, Taraval and Richmond are just larger, generally more residential and less in the center of everything. The Park and Northern districts on the other hand, are mostly affluent with a few outliers.
For example, for Caltrain, break each graph down further. Find the number of passengers who board at Baby Bullets, NB and SB, for the weekday commutes. What you need is more demographic data about the riders of each system, at specific times. Anyone whose been on Caltrain can tell you that the weekday commute is very much a white collar commute. Finance, Law and Tech going north to SF, mostly tech going south to MV (by the time baby bullets get to SJ Diridon, they are very empty). Palo Alto is an outlier, a lot of people commute from points south to Stanford, which obviously isn't a tech company.
Having said that, since I really enjoy developing transit software, I'm really going to take a look at the code and see what I can do. Its a really good start, and I'm happy they posted it to HN.
My only point is before I can even try to get any meaning from this I need to know the data makes sense. Maybe there are a bunch of low income apartments near Montgomery Station but if so they sure are well hidden.
edit: Checking the Fremont line it shows the median income at Montgomery Station as $112k where as the L line shows the same station as $23k. Something seems wrong or else I don't understand what it's showing.
A side question, though - is there a specific year when the shift of tech workers to SF picked up steam? I'm finding a wave of articles complaining about the Google shuttles in 2012-13 (about when I moved out to SF), but I don't have a good feel for how far along the process was at that point.
It's possible that the proliferation of private busing has made it more visible to residents, however. It used to just be everyone drove.
Based on rapidly increasing rents over the past 2 years in these neighborhoods, tech worker density has increased a lot. Anyone living in these areas in 2009-2010 will tell you that they'll never break their lease because market rents are 50-150% more than what they're paying due to strict rent controls.
the buses that go to the poor neighborhoods doesn't even ride on the main streets when in the good parts of the city. Also, the poor people buses have tinted windows!
if you can find maps, compare Metro ($1.25, short routes) routes with Dart ($0.75?, long routes) ones.
"both extreme povery and wealth, ..."
3.5% mortgage -> 50K/yr * 100% / 3.5%/yr = $1.5M house price
interest rates are so low these days, you can spend 50% more on principal for the same interest, compared to 2006 when rates were ~6.25%.
And houses here cost more than $1.5M.
(Side note: I was surprised to learn that private schools around here are $30K+/year!)
For instance, the image someone else already linked shows even the lowest rents at almost $2k: http://sfist.com/attachments/SFist_Brock/SF-Infographic.png
Yet the OP shows several downtown stops, like Powell St. and Civic Center as having less than $24k of income. That is, the average income is less than the average annual rent.
I have no idea how that possibly works.
Alternately, they might be getting unmarked income from relatives.
A factor of ten difference between census tracts in the same city is worth examining.
And, for whatever it's worth, I also think the variance even when the tracts are not next to each other is equally worthy of examination. Just because it is common does not mean it isn't something we shouldn't talk about. In many ways, when the neighborhoods are next to each other it is a good thing for visibility.
http://www.wnyc.org/blogs/wnyc-news-blog/2011/dec/08/census-...
Honestly, where do people get the idea that the average American makes $120k. That salary is astronomical.
It's household income, not per capita. The median household income for SF is $73. I don't think it's out of bounds to assume that for a white collar worker (call it a 75th percentile income) that number is well over $120.
(The median household income for a number of cities in this area exceeds $110K. They're not all execs. http://citylab.news21.com/data/types/19/)
About 30% of the US gets a bachelor's degree, which seems like a reasonable proxy for the number of people working in white collar office jobs. So a median white collar worker is probably about 80th percentile income. For the overall US, that works out to $105K to $110K. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
Table H-1. Income Limits for Each Fifth and Top 5 Percent of
All Households: 1967 to 2011
Year Lowest Second Third Fourth Top 5 percent
2011 20,262 38,520 62,434 101,582 186,000
1967 (adj) 19,931 38,866 55,164 78,663 126,232
1967 3,000 5,850 8,303 11,840 19,000
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Table H-2. Share of Aggregate Income Received by Each Fifth and
Top 5 Percent of Households, All Races: 1967 to 2011
Year Lowest Second Third Fourth Highest Top 5 percent
2011 3.2 8.4 14.3 23.0 51.1 22.3
1967 4.0 10.8 17.3 24.2 43.6 17.2
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Table H-3. Mean Household Income Received by Each Fifth and
Top 5 Percent, All Races: 1967 to 2011
Year Lowest Second Third Fourth Highest Top 5 percent
2011 11,239 29,204 49,842 80,080 178,020 311,444
1967 (adj) 10,630 29,452 47,018 65,787 118,393 186,758
1967 1,600 4,433 7,077 9,902 17,820 28,110
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Table H-6. Regions--All Races by Median and Mean Income: 1975 to 2011
Median income Mean income
Current $ 2011 $ Current $ 2011 $
2011 50,054 50,054 69,677 69,677
1975 11,800 44,851 13,779 52,373
---------------------------------------------------------------------
It simply means if you can break out of the slump and make your way into the top 20% of income earners that you will be more rewarded than you were 45 years ago.