This week, I spent a lot of time experimenting with Data Wrapper and how to create a visual using it. I created many different graphs while testing out this tool and I will attach them below-
As a background for anyone who did not see my original blog posts regarding this data ... I studied the total highway miles traveled in New York State vs. the US as a whole. The smaller data points that fall around the 120-130,000 range are the New York State total highway miles traveled per year, and the ones that fall around the 3 million range are the United States total highway miles traveled per year. As a disclaimer, I struggled a little bit with the tool Data Wrapper so as far as making a title, labeling my axes and making a key for my graph, those are all certainly goals but I could not figure them out this go around. I am certainly going to look to edit these in the future especially including another state like California to compare to.
As I was trying to decide on which final visual I wanted to use, I really struggled. The data set that I chose was so widely spaced out as far as numbers go that I really couldn't figure out which visual was best. When comparing anything from one state to the entire country, this would tend to be the problem. Obviously statewide highway miles traveled are going to be far less than countrywide. I decided that my final visual would be this:
This was the only graph I found that really showed the number of miles distinctly for both statewide and countrywide total highway miles traveled per year. I do not have much experience with designing data visuals...In fact, I think the last time I created a data visual may have been when I was in a high school science class. For me, I was a long time removed from creating a visual like this but overall, I think it came out pretty great!
I really was hoping to create a key for my graph showing that the right side was countrywide total highway miles and the left side was NY statewide total highway miles, but unfortunately I could not figure it out. I wanted my visual to represent the total NY state highway miles traveled per year going down, while the country wide total highway miles traveled per year going up. I felt that this sort of bar graph was the best way to represent this since the years all lined up with one another.
We will never know the direct answer, or if there even is one direct answer, as to why New York State's highway miles have been going down from 2010-2018. But I researched many different things in relation to this. One major thing I found a pattern of is the widespread growth of usage of companies like Uber and Lyft in New York City.
Are there necessarily less cars on the road now because of this?
Do less people own cars now?
Is New York City skewing the numbers for the entire state?
I really couldn't find any particular pattern related to any of these questions online, although one could assume. I did find that the use of apps like Uber and Lyft are much more common nowadays, which could be the reason behind this decrease in statewide highway miles traveled. It's interesting though that this may not be the only cause behind this decrease because there is more use of cars to travel around but maybe highways are just being used less frequently? And I wonder if people used to travel out of the city on the highway and now they take ubers to a train station or something like that? Maybe people just didn't have a ride to public transportation and didn't want to pay to park their car at a train station? So now that uber is available more they are able to have a way to get to a train and take that instead rather than driving their car on the highway to get somewhere?
I really couldn't find any sort of connection between the increase in usage of Uber/Lyft and the decrease in highway miles in NYS. I definitely had some speculations but no hard evidence to rely on
I really enjoyed researching this topic and understanding more about total highway miles traveled in a year in NYS vs USA. I ultimately can't wait for the report to come out for 2020's highway miles and see what effect COVID had on that! It will be really interesting to see...
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