Interactive map of BART ridership | Hacker News Reader

Interactive map of BART ridership

vudlab.com

33 pointslewis50023 comments

Very cool idea. I would highly recommend reversing the colors on the site however. It just looks wrong with the landmass being black and the water white given that the rest of the site uses a theme of black being the background and white being the content.

It actually took me about five to ten seconds to see the outline of SF and recognize it because at first I was looking at the water area and thinking "this doesn't look like the bay area".

Overall I think you should use a white or beigish background with black text, and for the map colors use black landmass and water the color of the page background. It will make the page so much easier to read.

tried it both ways. trouble with white background was that, given the diversity of colors and how thin some of the lines on the chord diagram are, it was hard to distinguish them well.

Maybe a light or dark gray would contrast well and still fit the aesthetic?

Blue water is a heavily-established pattern in mapmaking; do you gain anything by not just making the water blue? I understand you're going for a black / white aesthetic but to be honest, it's a well-worn one.

lewis500's essay about the BART strike is also super insightful: https://medium.com/p/ec6139b54795

(he studies transport engineering and economics, so he actually knows what he's talking about)

Too bad he never commits to either side. Just lots of talking around the issue.

That is usually an indication of someone knowing what they are talking about: they know there is no black and white easy answer to most issues (not always true though: they may also be a politician).

In addition to micampe's point, he actually does commit, very specifically. A quote:

"To be clear, I’m saying we should ignore the workers’ welfare beyond what is necessary to (a) provide the best ridership experience and (b) to guarantee BART workers the safety and living standard we regulate, at minimum, for all workers. No more and no less."

That is, the Bay Area public should support BART's side in this dispute, because money spent on labor (benefiting the few) is money that can't be spent on system investment (benefiting the many).

If we want to ensure that BART workers can afford to live in the area, that's an important but separate question, and it's better to address the cost of living broadly* than to treat BART employment as a highly targeted Social Security scheme for train operators and mechanics.

* E.g., substantial increases in the minimum wage, lessening restrictions on new housing, non-profit-oriented health care, and (shocker) effective public transit.

This was included in a set of visualizations built by members of the Bay Area D3.js User Group.

http://enjalot.github.io/bart/ http://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-d3-User-Group/events/13754175...

It's broken on Firefox 24.0; I see only the top part of the circle diagram. It works fine on Chrome, however.

Same for me; FF24, Linux.

Another way of analyzing the data might be to see which station pairs have ridership between them above-and-beyond what their total station ridership would suggest.

For instance, adjacent stations might be expected to have less ridership between them, because in many cases you could walk or bike between them.

Awesome! Shared it on Facebook.

Not sure if the data exists, but it would be amazing to see the map change over time, kind of like this: http://hint.fm/wind/

this looks really great. I'm from San Juan PR, we're still trying to convince the public transport board (AMA) to release their GPS data for the bus system.

The "Jimmy Dean Sausage and Chocolate Chip Pancake on a Stick" line is trending in the office. Good work!

You guys never cease to amaze. AWESOME

Very cool! I couldn't find it anywhere - where does the data come from?

Data is available here: http://www.bart.gov/about/reports/ridership.aspx. It ought to be cited more prominently!

the data and the context for the project are linked here: http://enjalot.github.io/bart/

colors for the map are bad :( My eyes are always thinking as white for land.

beautiful!

thanks man. your company is sweet.

wow! didn't expect to get a compliment in return. thank you! Feel free to join our community and hack on anything you're interested in: https://www.balancedpayments.com/open

Maybe this one: https://github.com/balanced/balanced-dashboard/issues/93?sou...

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