January 2022 Storytelling with Data Challenge: Visualizing Cycles
My weekday commute to my office in Manhattan used to be a regular cycle. But in mid-March 2020, I went from riding the subway five days a week to going months without riding it at all. I knew that subway ridership has failed to return to pre-pandemic norms, but I was curious about how subways, buses, and car traffic compared in the first year of the pandemic in NYC. I knew the drop-off in mid-March would be visually apparent, but I wasn't sure how things unfolded from there.
I wanted this to be a zoomed-out view, with the datapoints for the entire year giving a shape that could be compared among the three modes of transport. I decided to label only a few notable points on each chart, some highs and lows. I added a few headlines from the New York Times to emphasize story.
Since a radial chart would be new for me in any tool, I challenged myself to create visuals in Python. I found a tutorial by Yan Holtz for creating a circular barplot in Matplotlib. You can view my jupyter notebook, with data exploration.
I used the circular barplots to compare each mode of transport in a PowerPoint slide with annotations for my challenge submission.
