Turnstile Data Parsing

Liz Khoo and I have been working with the MTA Turnstile data for our semester-long project in Sculpting Data into Everyday Objects. Over the past few weeks we’ve been able to parse the data and visually investigate what we’ve got.

After paging through a few weeks of data it became clear that the days and weeks after Hurricane Sandy would be our focus. The system was dramatically brought offline just prior to landfall, and the data indicates just how long it took for stations to resume operation after the storm passed.

Screenshots

This was our initial sketch showing the volume of riders entering the system. This screen represents 24 “control units” at 1 station over 1 week.

Here we’re parsing all stations over the course of a week. The bright white activity on the left is the flow prior to Sandy, and the right is just starting to show the first stations coming back online.

We mapped the station data to their geographic coordinates to create this map. Scrubbing the mouse horizontally changes the brightness of the dots correspondant to the traffic shown in the screenshot above. This sketch is parsing 3 weeks of data, which gives us a better indication of how long it took for the stations to recover.

In this sketch we looked at how long an individual station took to come back online. Darker stations took longer. We’re tentatively going to use this data as the basis for our X, Y and Z values for 3D modeling.