Data Visualization Project

We are in week one of our data visualization project. I struggled quite a bit to figure out what direction I wanted to go with this project. There is so much interesting data readily available nowadays that I was a little overwhelmed. (Ask Brooke, I think I texted her like 15 times about this before I just sat down and forced myself to decide on something. Sorry Brooke!!!)

Since my boyfriend is trying to become a police officer right now, he is constantly looking into data related to a vast majority of things that could be considered his job at some point. When deciding on a topic, I was thinking of a number of different things.. I was mostly wondering if COVID had an impact on a lot of things related to being a police officer, and I was quite certain that it had. This spiraled into many different thoughts in my head. Just to name a few:

Have people been going more places via car since COVID?

Have people been driving more or less since COVID?

Has there been more or less domestic violence cases?

Are there more or less people that are homeless now?

Anyway, we can likely guess the probable responses to many of these questions... not to mention I am sure some would argue that COVID isn't gone yet and there is probably not enough data yet to gather solid information on any of these exact questions.

Then, I started to think about how some of these things have changed over the years. Not necessarily related to COVID, but the current situation just got me to thinking about many of these things. And I would love to certainly re-explore this in the future when there is significant data accumulated from the impact of COVID. This will be super interesting to see things change as a direct result of this virus.

I was most interested in driving-related topics. It seems that many people around me have been driving significantly less since COVID really started in March. Many people are working from home and no longer having to travel to work anymore. Less people are going out to restaurants/bars out of fear of getting the virus. People are seeming to take fewer trips to the grocery stores/department stores out of fear of getting the virus. Oddly enough though, I feel like I have been driving more since March. I have been driving to hiking trails, to the bike path, to see my parents more, just to give myself things to do and to get out of the house and avoid going crazy.

This whole long thought process lead me to want to look into how the number of highway miles driven has varied over the years, specifically in New York. We have so much public transportation readily available in the southern part of New York and (prior to COVID) I am wondering if people have taken more advantage of that over the years?

The data that I found was that although across the country people seem to be driving more highway miles, this is not the case in New York state. I found this data so interesting because it lead me to a bunch more questions in my head. Including:

Is the population of licensed drivers going down?

Are people using public transportation more?

Are gas prices influencing people to drive less?

Are bicycles becoming more widely used?

Does uber and other rideshare apps have anything to do with this?

Are people becoming more environmentally conscious?

Are people carpooling more?

I found this topic to be such an interesting one to research because there are so many different things that could be affecting people's driving habits. This data shows up to 2018 with data so I really am going to be interested in the next report that will contain 2019 and 2020's data on this since we will really see the effects of COVID in that next report. I am so glad I got to explore this trend now because I can then see how much COVID really did impact driving habits.