the best maps we've seen of sandy's transit outage in new york · 25/01/2013 · when...
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1/29/13 The Best Maps We've Seen of Sandy's Transit Outage in New York - Commute - The Atlantic Cities
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EMILY BADGER JAN 25, 2013 2 COMMENTS
MAPS
The Best Maps We've Seen of Sandy'sTransit Outage in New York
By now, tales of Hurricane Sandy’s impact on the New York City transit system have been widely
and well told. The storm managed, with awe-inspiring force, to sever the subway arteries of the
largest city in America. And just as impressively, New York managed to bail out the water and get
moving again.
But we were struck recently by a pair of novel images of the city before and after its transportation
network fell into disarray. These two maps come courtesy of the developers behind
OpenTripPlanner. This first one, showing the city before the storm, illustrates how accessible each
corner of New York was with a typical morning’s use of the transit system:
OpenTripPlanner Analyst project
The yellow areas are the parts of the city that 7.5 million New Yorkers can reach from home in less
than an hour by public transit and walking. The red areas are within an hour’s commute of 6
million people in the metropolitan area. The blue areas are accessible by 4 million people, and the
gray areas by 2 million.
And then there’s this map, which shows the same landscape as it was accessible to New Yorkers
right after Hurricane Sandy:
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OpenTripPlanner Analyst project
To unpack exactly what we’re looking at here – and what these pictures mean for urban planners
elsewhere – it’s helpful to step back a bit. Geographers and planners have talked for decades of
building accessibility measurements to illustrate and understand how far people are located in cities
from the resources they need. But until now, it’s been difficult to paint that picture with any real
fine-grained detail. You may have seen, for instance, more basic maps that illustrate all the jobs or
affordable housing units within a given radius drawn around a metro station.
“You’d see low levels of detail, and big blocks of color,” says Andrew Byrd, one of
OpenTripPlanner's main contributors. He's been trying to re-purpose the tool for transportation
planning and analysis and worked on the above maps. “We’re trying to get very precise, and we’ve
been able to do that by having all this data available that we didn’t have before.”
These two maps were built using Census data and the OpenTripPlanner route-planning tool, a
multi-modal, open-source platform that models travel itineraries for users (with the help of GTFS
data feeds from transit agencies, among other sources). Sandy effectively disabled all of the
underwater subway tunnels connecting Manhattan with other parts of New York, dramatically
altering the transit service for several days. When that happened, New Yorker Alastair Coote
modified the public GTFS feed from the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority to remove the
closed subway stations and account for added shuttle service after the storm. By doing that, he
created an emergency route-planning tool using OpenTripPlanner to help New Yorkers navigate
the city with dramatically reduced transit service.
Byrd had meanwhile been experimenting with OpenTripPlanner as an instrument for urban-
planning analysis. "This was kind of a perfect situation to apply it," he says. Coote's modified GTFS
feeds created an opportunity to map mobility in the city in scenarios with normal and dramatically
altered transit service. You can think of the above images as insanely complex travel-time maps.
Cities previously wrote about travel-time maps like this one, which illustrates how far a person can
travel on transit in 30 minutes from the center of Chicago:
Mapnificent
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Byrd's maps more or less simultaneously illustrate that picture, before and after Sandy, for every
person living in the New York Metropolitan area (based on Census data showing the number of
residents per block throughout the city). “It’s as if everyone in the city took transportation at the
same time to everywhere they could possibility go – at the same time – and then you accumulate
everything,” Byrd explains.
You can also think of the result this way: For each pixel on the above maps, OpenTripPlanner has
calculated how many people in New York are within an hour of there by transit and foot.
Manhattan normally appears as the most accessible place in the city, shown in bright yellow in the
first map. And this is no accident.
“There’s really this incredible connection between how accessible places are, and how densely
populated they are, and densely used and densely built up they are,” Byrd says. You can argue
about whether this correlation happens because transit access enables density, or because transit
follows density where it already exists. “To me the most important thing is not which one causes
the other,” Byrd says. “The most important thing is that public transit networks – the structure
they have, and how they’re connecting things – that completely changes how people perceive
distances.”
In cities, we perceive distance not by miles traveled but by the time required to cover those miles.
And so bright yellow Manhattan feels like the center of New York, even thought it isn’t
geographically in the middle. “It’s the place where the most people are the closest to the most other
people,” Byrd says.
At least, that was the case the day before Sandy.
“Just cutting some of the lines in the transit system completely changes that landscape,” Byrd says.
This third map shows the difference between the above two – in other words, the places where
accessibility was most dramatically impacted by Sandy:
OpenTripPlanner Analyst project
The city has long since returned to normal, to the map shown at the top of this post. But looking
back on these visualizations, two things become clear for New York and any other city moving
forward: Transit access dramatically changes a city's landscape as it's experienced by people moving
through it, and unlikely tools like trip planners may be just what we need to start filling out that
picture.
Keywords: New York, Mobility, Accessibility, OpenTripPlanner, hurricane sandy, Disasters, Transit
Emily Badger is a staff writer at The Atlantic Cities. Her work has previously appeared in Pacific
Standard, GOOD, The Christian Science Monitor, and The New York Times. She lives in the Washington,
D.C. area. All posts »
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1/29/13 The Best Maps We've Seen of Sandy's Transit Outage in New York - Commute - The Atlantic Cities
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