BART stats part 2: Transbay traffic and BART chart races
Get on the data train
Thanks for joining me for the sixth edition of the Golden Stats Warrior, a newsletter for data-based insights about the Bay Area. If this is your first time reading, welcome! If you haven’t signed up yet, you can do that here.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about recent trends in BART usage, and in that edition I crowdsourced your ideas and thoughts. I got some great feedback, and today’s shorter newsletter will explore some of your thoughts and analysis ideas. Let’s take them one question at a time.
In which direction do most BART trips go across the Bay?
The most common question I received was about how cross bay traffic is changing. To see which way people are commuting, I took a look at trips taken everyday before 11 am. The main change over the past decade is a huge rise in the number of people coming from the East Bay to the Peninsula for work.
Only part of this is because BART has expanded in the East Bay. Another big reason is that San Francisco and Silicon Valley are producing a ton of jobs, but not a lot of housing for low and middle income workers. San Francisco’s share of the Bay Area population has fallen slightly over this period.
As a result, many people are moving to the East Bay and commuting to the city—there are 250,000 more people in Alameda and Contra Costa Counties in 2018 than there were in 2010. The commuting numbers would probably be even bigger if the Transbay tube did not have limited capacity (only so many cars can run through it in an hour).
How do stops compare in their business throughout the day?
One reader was curious how the business of different stops looks across the day. Below I have charted the entries by hour to four different stops. We can see that Fruitvale and Montgomery spike when commuters leave for work and go home, but that Berkeley is a bit more consistently used throughout the day. Presumably this is because academics have unusual hours.
Why have Muni and Bart diverged in popularity?
When it comes to examining BART data, I am a dilettante. Many researchers, including those at BART, have used it in much more sophisticated ways. I learned through Twitter that the transportation engineer Greg Erhardt looked at BART and MUNI data for his PhD thesis, in part as a way to measure the demand for future transportation projects. As part of his work, he found that BART and MUNI have taken divergent paths. While BART’s ridership has grown over the past twenty years, MUNI ridership has barely budged. While Erhardt could not entirely explain the difference, the most compelling theory is that San Francisco is getting old. People over 65 are less likely to use transit, and there are an increasing number of them in the city. (Erhardt made the chart below.)
A BART chart race
Ok, so nobody asked for this, but I was inspired to make a bar chart race using the BART data. I examined which stations are busiest throughout the day. Click here for the full experience (the bars move), but here is a screenshot below.
Bay Area media recommendation of the week
This week on the KQED Arts podcast Rightnowish pointed out the Bay Area now has an arguably even cooler version of NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts. Performed and produced by Oakland School of the Arts students, the video series is named Room 302 after the classroom where the videos are made. You should listen to the podcast to hear about how the educator Cava Menzies, who leads the classroom, sees these joyous videos as a way to help the students and community heal. I particularly enjoyed the performances by Deva Rani, Ajai Kasim and VISUALEYES. Imagine being this creative and composed as a teenager!
(If you read or listened to something great about the Bay Area this week, please send it to me!)
Dan’s favorite things
Each issue I also mention an activity I recommend for those living in the area.
When I first moved to the Bay Area and lived in San Francisco, I was delighted to find that San Francisco might just have the greatest set of freely available walking tours in the world. San Francisco City Guides runs over 80 different free tours in the city that span nearly the entire city, from the Financial District and Chinatown to residential neighborhoods like the Inner Sunset and Visitacion Valley. I’ve done something like 15 of the tours, and my favorite was of the Coit Tower Murals, which explored the surprising radical Depression era art found inside one of San Francisco’s most notable buildings.
Thanks for your time, and see you in a couple weeks.
If you think a friend might enjoy this newsletter, please forward it along. You can follow me on Twitter at @dkopf or email me at dan.kopf@gmail.com
The Golden Stats Warrior logo was made by the great Jared Joiner, the best friend a nervous newsletter writer could have. Follow him @jnjoiner. Also, thanks to the brilliant Natalie Nava for copyediting.