Atlanta Commuting Patterns

MARTA's proposed expansion plan has made me think about where people live and work in the city. A friend recently introduced me to the LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics data which has work and home data by census block. This data shows interesting commuting trends in Atlanta. For example, most people who work at or near the airport tend to live south of the perimeter:

Most common home locations of employees at/near the airport

Larger end points indicate more people. Census tracts that make up less than 0.25% of the workforce are not included. So there are other employees north of the airport, just not enough to include in the map. The interactive version below has a tab, "Dots", that includes all locations and mouse-over that shows the actual number and percentage of commuters.

Another interesting census tract is the one that contains Emory University:

Most common home locations of employees at/near Emory

Emory employees tend to live close to campus or farther east. Notice the Emory image is more zoomed-in than the airport, and still shows most employees.

Neighboring census tracts can have much different commuting patterns. The south downtown census tract that includes city hall has employees who mostly commute from further south:

Most common home locations of south downtown employees (includes city hall)

And the downtown census tract that includes the Coke headquarters has more employees that commute from north of the office:

Most common home locations of north downtown employees (includes Coke)

I use Coke as an example of a well known employer in that census tract. But both of the downtown census tracts described span several blocks, and contain multiple employers. The interactive tool below shows this more clearly. Use the zoom tools in the upper left to more closely see which neighborhoods are covered. Or try the "Dots" tab to see a more complete view.

The visual also allows you to toggle from viewing all home locations of a given work location to viewing the reverse- all work locations of a given residential neighborhood. Using this option, I can see that most people in my neighborhood commute to downtown/midtown, or north to Emory or further. Very few commute south or east.

Most common work locations of residents in my census tract (West Kirkwood)

I started this data analysis as part of a post on the MARTA expansion, but decided on a stand-alone post. If you're interested in the MARTA post, follow me on twitter of google+, or use the e-mail subscription box on the right.

City of Atlanta Budget, FY2017

The City of Atlanta recently released their proposed Fiscal Year 2017 budget. The city provides a 640-page document explaining the budget, as well as interactive data visuals in the Atlanta Budget Explorer (ABE). I was part of the team that created ABE in 2014 after we built a prototype in a city hackathon. To supplement the information in ABE this year I created the interactive visuals below to explore the 2017 proposed budget.

The first visual shows the 2017 budget by department, and the changes from the 2016 budget in both dollar amounts and as a percentage. The visual is interactive; click a department to view spending by office and account.

The data show the police department is the largest city department at $181.39 million, which is a $6.8 million increase from 2016, or 3.9%. However, if you click on the police services, you'll see that the budget for uniform patrol has dropped by 1.5% (closer to 3% in real terms, assuming inflation). The Account drill-down shows that total salaries for sworn officers is increasing by 2.1%, so the decline in uniform patrol spending does not indicate a decline in the total number of officers. The budget book (p. 75) confirms there is not a decline in staff. 

The largest increase in the police department is $6.29 million for "SSP Administration". Consulting the budget book (p. 351), I can see that "SSP" is the "Strategy and Special Projects Division". However, it is unclear to me whether the SSP increase is new spending, or just a re-organization of existing services (perhaps out of uniform patrol, explaining the decrease). This is a good example of the breadth and limitations of the budget data used to create the visuals. As one might expect, the budget data set does not have detailed department descriptions or narratives. Therefore, the budget book is a useful compliment. For more detail, you can attend the public hearing on May 12 or email the city council.

The next visual shows budget changes by department over time. This visual is also interactive by clicking a department.

This view shows which departments have been consistently growing, such as city council, whose budget rose from $6.37 million in 2013 to a proposed $12.71 million in 2017.

The last visual shows revenue, both the 2017 amounts and the multi-year changes.

Property tax is the largest source of city revenue, but the visual shows the city raises money in several different ways. Property tax revenue is projected to fall this year, despite the city's growth. This is because some of the city's new construction falls in Tax Allocation Districts and due to roll-backs from the Georgia Taxpayer Bill of Rights.

The visuals above only show budget and revenue from the city's general fund. Both ABE and the budget book have more details on other funds, such as special revenue.

Of course the budget data and budget book don't answer every question about the budget (and can't be expected to do so), but both the level of detail and the accessibility of the information are impressive.

Update: Councilman Alex Wan has a nice Youtube video encouraging engagement in the budget process.

Atlanta Home Prices

My previous post on Atlanta housing shows rental prices by neighborhood and their five-year trend. This post uses home price data from Zillow to look at an eighteen-year trend. I'll also explore the divide between southwest and northeast Atlanta and racial income gaps.

First, a map of home prices in Atlanta, as of November 2015. This map was created using price per square foot data from Zillow and multiplying to estimate the average price for a 2000 square foot home. Blank neighborhoods do not have data in the Zillow dataset.

As expected, the map looks similar to the apartment price map- neighborhoods with expensive homes tend to have expensive apartments. The graph below demonstrates this by graphing home prices against apartment prices. 

This graph is helpful for understanding the data set. Neighborhoods above the trend line, like Midtown and Downtown, have high rental prices relative to home prices. This could be because rental stock that is nicer than home stock, or because many homes in these neighborhoods are condominiums, and are less expensive on a price per square foot basis because they have condo fees and less land per resident than a traditional home.

The home price map also shows a striking divide between Northeast and Southwest Atlanta. The graph below investigates this by graphing the home price for the two halves of Atlanta. All prices are adjusted to 2015 prices using the CPI.

The Southwest rose by more on a percentage basis from 1998 to 2006- 62% compared to the Northeast's 38%. But home values in the Southwest then fell by 59% during and after the recession, while homes in the Northeast only fell by 31%. The Northeast homes are now only 8% below their pre-recession high, while Southwest homes are 57% below their pre-recession high.

The larger price swings in Southwest Atlanta were caused at least in part by federal programs. Both Presidents Clinton and Bush led programs designed to increase home ownership among low to middle income households, and Bush specifically targeted his program towards minorities. These programs increased prices in low-income neighborhoods by creating increased demand, and the lax lending rules put the neighborhoods at a greater risk during a recession. The less educated were also more likely to lose their jobs during the recession, compounding the problem.

The unintended consequences of the home-ownership programs is similar to the problems with affordable housing programs described in my previous post- they are well-intentioned programs designed to help the poor and middle class, but end up making the average person worse-off because they distort the market.

Back to Atlanta: The video below shows how each individual neighborhood changed from 1998 to 2015.

For those interested: click here for the interactive graph version of the above video. Or click here for the video (or graph) that shows growth to 2015 over time (instead of growth from 1998), which I think is less intuitive but more relevant.

Comparing Northeast and Southwest Atlanta raises the question of race- the Northeast half is mostly white, and the Southwest half is mostly black. The graph below shows median household income for blacks and whites in the city of Atlanta, as well as the Metro area and the country.



The income gap for the city of Atlanta is depressing. Blacks in Atlanta have noticeably lower incomes than the national average for blacks, while whites have higher incomes than the national average. This situation is unique to the city proper- in Atlanta's metropolitan statistical area, blacks have a higher income than the national average.

My last post led to interesting discussion on Atlanta Reddit and Curbed Atlanta. I also received an e-mail from Jarod Apperson on the relationship between gentrification and luxury construction:

Related to this topic, one thing I think could use more clarity is the relationship between luxury construction and gentrification.  If gentrification is defined as an area's mean income, rents, etc. rising from wealthier residents moving in, that can happen either through displacement, new construction, or some mix of the two.  Often displacement is what folks get most worried about.  It is concerning to think that people who have lived in a community for some time are not able to continue doing so because of changes happening around them.  In lamenting that new construction is expensive, the articles you point to seem to be misinterpreting the reality of new (luxury!) construction's relationship with displacment, which you hint at in point 4 on your list of takeaways.  

Michell Eloy at WABE: "But low- and middle-income renters – renters like Huftalen – say they feel increasingly squeezed by the market, unable to afford the new luxury apartments and edged out by stiff competition and equally high prices for older units."
The point Eloy fails to make is that were it not for new luxury apartments, the high prices for older units would have risen even more (more on that in a second).  

Editorial Board at CL: "But left unchecked, this environment could create a frightening affordability crisis where, years down the line, Atlanta is only a place for the well to do. That's how affordability crunches happen — developments get rolled out, the city's population grows — and boom — you're suddenly pushed out by property taxes and house-hunting in Riverdale."

No, that's not how affordability crunches happen.  New residential developments rolling out, do not make housing less affordable.  In fact, they do the opposite.  Rising residential demand from any number of factors (preference for less time in traffic, proximity to new amenities like the Beltline, proximity to new restaurants/stores etc.), leads to affordability crunches.  Meanwhile as new housing developments get rolled out, they ameliorate such crunches.
Rather than lamenting luxury construction, these writers should be championing luxury construction as a deterrent from the displacement they are so worried about.  The reason is this: by decreasing demand for older units, new luxury construction lowers rents for the existing housing stock.  The theory is simple.  When a new building opens, it attracts some residents from older places nearby and because there is less demand for their units, those places charge rents that are lower than they would be in the absence of this new construction (note that this doesn't mean rents necessarily go down at older places, they might go down sometimes, but they certianly end up lower than they would in the absence of new residential construction).

So, given this wrinkle, what really matters is changes in the distribution of rents, not changes in the mean rent.  It is entirely possible for mean rents to rise substantially without any displacement occurring as long as housing options aren't lost on the left side of the distribution.  

Indeed there is evidence of this phenomenon is occurring here in Atlanta.  A recent BisNow article reports, "While rents shot up another 10 cents/SF on average to $1.76/SF...same-unit rents actually slipped nearly 4% year-over-year."  So what is happening is this: new developments are opening at above-average rents (luxury units, raising the mean), and attracting at least some tenants who would have otherwise chosen nearby existing multifamily units.  As a result, those existing multifamily units are getting cheaper, lowering their prices to stay full.  In other words, not only is luxury construction not leading to displacement, it is actually preventing displacement.  It is keeping our city affordable.

It would be a shame to see a plan like this one derail luxury construction's role in keeping Atlanta affordable.  I worry that a misunderstanding of housing markets on the part of both the press and politicians may end up leading Atlanta toward less affordable housing, despite hopes for more.

Update (1/24/16): commenters on reddit point out that Atlanta had high levels of mortgage fraud before the recession, which inflated home values. This happened in both low-income and high-income neighborhoods. Lax lending rules intended to increase home ownership rates were partially responsible for this problem too.

Atlanta Rental Prices: A Tale of Two Cities

Neighborhoods in Old Fourth Ward have gone from abandoned to beautiful in a few short years. A beautiful park, apartments, and Ponce City Market exist in a space formerly occupied by warehouses, parking lots, and abandoned buildings. As this space and others have improved, the rents have rose, and several recent articles voice this concern.

My neighborhood in Kirkwood is great and far cheaper than where my sisters live in New York and DC, so I wanted to better understand calls for city hall to take action on affordable rents. I downloaded data on average apartment prices by neighborhood from Zillow to make this visual:

Mouse over the map to get price per square foot for each neighborhood, and the five year price change, adjusted for inflation (CPI). Blank neighborhoods are missing in the Zillow data.

Its true that there are a couple neighborhoods in Buckhead with median rent over $2 per square foot, and Midtown is up to $1.85 per square foot. But half the city can still be rented for less than $1 per square foot. My own neighborhood has a median rental price of $1.19 per square foot.

To better show change over time, the visual below shows current price graphed against the five year percentage change in prices.

The visual is striking. Although a price divide existed between the Southwest and Northeast halves of the city five years ago, almost every neighborhood in the Southwest half of the city has gotten less expensive, and every neighborhood in the Northeast half has gotten more expensive.

I have several take-aways from these graphs.

1. When people complain that the city is getting too expensive, they only mean the most desirable neighborhoods where they want to live. Half the city is very cheap.

2. Price is a good measure of desirable neighborhoods. The divide between nice neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods in Atlanta is growing.

3. Plans for affordable housing should be very careful. Most affordable housing plans actually make housing more expensive. Consider a policy that requires XX% of affordable housing per new development. Less total developments will be built because developments are now less profitable. Then, in the developments that are built, less units will be on the open market. Prices are then higher due to the policy because the housing supply is smaller. Good for the lucky few who win the affordable housing lottery, but bad for everyone else.

4. Atlanta should instead be very generous in encouraging and approving development. Increased housing supply will help keep down prices and allow more people to live where they desire.

5. Increased property tax from development can then help our poor neighborhoods improve. Luxury buildings, scary to some, generate property taxes that can be spent on improving schools, safety, and transit, or on more targeted development plans. Atlanta needs to increase investment in poor neighborhoods as property taxes rise. Luxury buildings also have residents who contribute to the economy and benefit local low-wage earners.

I'll publish another post on home price data from Zillow later this week. There are some differences from the apartment data, and more years. For a notification, use the google plus or e-mail widgets on the right, or follow me on twitter. 

MARTA Expansion: What does the data say?

There have been several recent discussions in Atlanta around major MARTA expansions. News agencies this summer reported MARTA has a not yet funded plan for an $8 billion expansion to Alpharetta, Emory, and East along I-20. A spring poll of Gwinnett voters shows their interest in MARTA, and the City of Atlanta has early plans for a streetcar expansion.

Would these expansions be good for the city? How do we think about this beyond, "I'm a liberal who likes public transit" or, "I'm a conservative who likes low taxes and my awesome SUV"?

Current Usage

For starters, how are residents currently utilizing MARTA? The graph below shows usage per station by cities with heavy rail. Atlanta ridership is not a total disaster like Cleveland, but is well behind the top five. If Atlanta residents aren't utilizing our current stations, we probably don't need more.

Riders per station is calculated by dividing total unlinked trips by total number of stations, and dividing by two to account for one entry and exit per trip.

Cost is another important component to current usage. Is it sustainable? Current MARTA CEO Keith Parker has been praised for his fiscal leadership (and several other accomplishments) but all public transit systems are publicly subsidized. The graph below shows how MARTA compares.

Source: National Transit Database

MARTA rails rides averaged a $2.05 cost to the city in 2014. Atlanta, again, is performing much better than Cleveland, but MARTA is much more expensive to run than leading cities.

Density

Density is also a useful data point for understanding public transit. Guerra and Cervero of UC Berkeley argue that cities should set goals of at least 45 people per gross acre in the half mile surrounding heavy rail stations. (This is equivalent to about 29,000 people per square mile.)

The map below shows that metro Atlanta has no neighborhoods that are even close to this metric. Two census tracts in midtown have densities of about 19,000 per square mile.

Forty-five people per acre is only an estimate. It is also useful to compare Atlanta with other cities that have large heavy rail investments. In the visuals below, Atlanta's density is mapped along with eight other cities that have at least 50 million annual heavy rail passengers. A different color scale (0-100,000) is used from above to accommodate more dense cities. The transition from orange to blue is set at 30,000- to demonstrate Guerra and Cervero's suggested cut-off.


See this post for flat files of the same images.

Atlanta is clearly far less dense than other heavy-rail cities, and is far less dense than experts recommend for heavy rail. There are two possible takes on this: "we need more public transit to get more dense!" or, "additional public transit infrastructure is a bad investment" I tend to fall in the second camp- Atlanta already has a significant public transit investment, yet we're one of the least dense cities in the US. (Related- Atlanta ridership is high relative to our low density.) More public transit investment alone won't change that. 

Instead, metro Atlanta needs to increase density around its current stations. Midtown has an impressive number of current and projected projects, which will increase that neighborhood's density and serve as a draw for riders boarding other stops. MARTA's transit-oriented development is also a good step in that direction, but the plots ranging from two to ten acres owned by MARTA are not large enough to have a major impact on density. (Helpful math fact: there are 640 acres in a square mile.) Increasing density in a meaningful way will require partnerships and investments by local agencies beyond MARTA.

Building a Better Crime Map: Learning QGIS for Mapping in Tableau

Hover over the map above to view crime rates by census tract. Use the zoom tools in the upper left to better locate your neighborhood.

I don't usually post how-to Tableau blog posts because there are so many good ones out there, but I learned some new tools for this one and wanted to share.

A friend of mine was recently complaining about local hackathons, "Great, just what we need, another crime map." Although I'm not usually confused by sarcasm, I decided to build a crime map. The Atlanta neighborhood crime maps I found were based on counts instead of rates, which is misleading when neighborhoods have different populations. There were other weaknesses too; some maps don't reveal their methodology, and most only offer a map, without the type of actions to other data that are easy in Tableau.

The Atlanta Police department shares a great crime dataset on their website that includes location coordinates, crime type, time, date, and neighborhood for the past five+ years. The problem is that Atlanta neighborhoods don't have good population data, making a crime rate per person difficult to calculate. So instead of using neighborhoods I used census tracts. To show crime rate per census tract in Tableau, I first had to merge the crime points to census shapes, something I had never done.

QGIS

I understood that I'd have to use GIS software (which I had never used) to merge points to shapes. I downloaded QGIS and did a couple beginner tutorials. QGIS is a free, open source software, and I found it easy to use, and very powerful.

I then tried a points in polygon analysis with my data. I merged the APD data with Georgia census tracts. I had to use a subset of the crime data because this merge was very slow. The result had the number of crimes per census tract, but I actually needed the census tract for each individual crime so I could take advantage of Tableau's aggregation and filtering features.

A spatial join allowed me to perform the merge I needed. The APD data was my target vector layer and the census data was my join vector layer. This technique was also much faster (not sure why) so the full data set was not a problem.

Excel

I then saved the crime data as an excel file and merged in income and population data by census tract, using Excel because sometimes I'm lazy. I used census tract population and income data from the 2013 American Communities Survey 5-year data set, available on American FactFinder.

Alteryx

Although I merged census tract to points, I still needed to load the census shapes in Tableau for the visual. To do this, I used the Tableau Shapefile to Polgon Converter from Alteryx. Theres a few way to do this, but I find the Alteryx solution very easy, as long as the shapefile isn't too huge.

Tableau

I then loaded the census tract file in Tableau to make a polygon-shaded map and blended in the crime data on census tract geoID to make the color variable. The resulting visual, with some additional graphs as hover actions, is at the top of the post.

Counts vs. Rates

To see the value of switching to counts, see the two maps below using counts on the right and rates on the left. The maps are noticeably different, with the highest crime area moving from downtown to a southeast tract.

Understanding the Data

I also investigated the resulting product based on my curiosity about crime in my city. I eventually realized that the larceny variable had a big impact on the map. Larceny is the most common and mild crime in the dataset- theft without the use of force or trespassing. This includes shoplifting, so the larceny variable was highlighting commercial neighborhoods, which is misleading because my rate only controls for residential population. So dropping the larceny variable made the map much more accurate as a picture of residential crime rate. I would have missed this if I hadn't spent time investigating the resulting visual. See below. Including the larceny offenses really highlights downtown, which I don't think is accurate.

I also added a couple other visuals with the crime data that didn't map census tracts. I put the visual together in this post geared towards a less technical audience.

Atlanta Crime Map

Crime maps often show only counts, but this map uses census data to show crime as a rate, giving a more accurate picture. 

Hover over the map above to view crime rates by census tract. Use the zoom tools in the upper left to better locate your neighborhood. 

The city has large variations in crime rates. The northern Atlanta neighborhood with the lowest crime rate in the city (between Northside Parkway and Peachtree Road), has a crime rate of 2.8 per 1000 residents, while some neighborhoods have crime rates of over 100 per 1000 residents.

To better understand the map consider the graph below with my own neighborhood highlighted.

In the "2014 Crime Rate by Type" graph, I'm glad to see that my neighborhood's crime rate  is below the city average for each category. Burglary is the most common crime and closest to the city average as a percentage, which seems to mirror the concerns I see on my neighborhood Facebook page. However, that rate is about 10 per 1000 persons (1%), so risk of being burglarized in a given year is not high.

The "Crimes per Year" graph also has promising trends for my neighborhood. Last year (2014) was a relatively low year for crime in my neighborhood, and there has been a large drop since 2009.

These maps include all crime recorded in the public Atlanta Police Department dataset, with the exception of larceny (theft without unlawful entry or threat of force). Larceny was excluded because it includes shoplifting, and resulting maps then show highest crime rates in commercial areas, and differing levels of residential crime are harder to see.

The maps above use census tracts instead of city neighborhoods because census tracts have better population data. The visual below uses neighborhoods to show changes in crime rates and to map the location of each crime. Larceny is included in these maps. Again, my own neighborhood is highlighted, but the user can click on any neighborhood using the graph on the left.

The map shows exact locations of crimes and I'm able to see there were only three robberies (the category that includes muggings) in Kirkwood during the first half of 2015 (January-May 18). I also found it useful to pick a longer time range (slider on top right) and a single crime type (drop down on the top left), then see what times of day that crime occurs. In Kirkwood, robberies tend to happen in the evenings, but burglaries are more likely to happen in the morning.

Update (7/12): I had a couple people  ask about the relationship between income in crime. It's pretty strong; see the graph below. Census tract income data during non-census years is not very precise (I'm using the ACS 2013 five-year file); otherwise the relationship would be even stronger.

For a more information on to build these visuals, see this post.

Mapping Atlanta's Champion Trees

Atlanta's largest tree, center foreground.

The largest tree in Atlanta sits a block from Turner Field at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The great cherrybark oak is 23 feet in circumference and over 100 feet tall, and shares its space with terminal cancer patients cared for by Catholic nuns. The staff will gladly show visitors their prized tree, old, gnarled, and massive.

Over the past few months, I visited several of Atlanta’s largest trees. This gave me the privilege of viewing incredible trees and tricked me into exploring new parts of the city. The tallest tree in the city is as tall as a sixteen story building, and many of these trees were around before the civil war. While tall, healthy trees may not be the first thing we associate with cities, urban trees are often larger than those in forests. Urban trees are few but can grow both wide and tall while forests trees compete with each other for resources, resulting in tall trees with relatively narrow trunks and canopies. Further, most forests are either periodically logged or only recently protected (relative to the age of a great tree) while some trees in urban parks and on private residences have been able to grow to great size and age due to their protected locations.

The map below shows the champion trees of Atlanta. Champion tree points are a formula found by summing the trunk circumference in inches, the height in feet, and one-quarter of the average crown spread (canopy) in feet. The Atlanta champion tree list contains the local champions of over 100 different species and their close runners up and is maintained by Eli Dickerson, a volunteer with Trees Atlanta. Source data for the list is supplied by Eli and other tree enthusiasts who find and measure large trees across the city.

The map shows that many of Atlanta’s largest trees reside in old Intown neighborhoods on the near East side of Atlanta and in the corridor stretching from Piedmont Park to Atlanta Memorial Park.

Use the zoom controls in the upper left of the map to find your neighborhood, or use the bar graph on the left to click on large trees and show their location and an image for that species.

Let me know in the comments if you visit the champion trees in real life!

Public Transit: All About Density

I grew up outside of a small town of about 8,000. If we wanted to go anywhere other than the local crick we needed to drive. Imagine my surprise when I was 14 and visited Montreal: a massive subway system and underground malls! Big city folk had a whole different lifestyle.

Now I live in Atlanta and drive everywhere.

My experience in Atlanta isn't unique. See the graph below, which shows average daily usage of all public transit in a city. (You can filter to a specific type in the bottom right.) New York City has more than twice the per capita public transit usage of any other metro area. Most metros have less than 0.1 daily trips per person. Those trips are unlinked (i.e. a transfer counts as another trip) and don't count return trips, so in most metros less than 5% of the population uses public transit on a given day.

Learn About Tableau

This leads people to say, "the public transportation in city X sucks". We've all heard it. But look at the graph again. New York City has twice the transit usage of any other city, but is also more than twice as dense (denoted by color). Why does this matter? Based on average density, in New York City 6,100 people live within a quarter mile of each metro stop¹ while 430 people in Atlanta live within a quarter mile of each metro stop. Also, the alternative (driving) is much worse in a denser city. Traffic may not be great in Atlanta, but its far worse in a city with 15 times the density.

So, how does Atlanta's transit stack up when controlling for density? See the graph below. Atlanta is one of the least dense big metros in America, but compared to similarly dense metro ares, Atlanta has a high rate of public transit usage. For example, observe Jacksonville which also has a little more than two thousand persons per square mile. Jacksonville has about 0.03 daily trips per capita and is right on the trend line (the average for similarly dense cities). Atlanta has over twice the usage of Jacksonville.

Learn About Tableau

This visual is full of other fun information. Washington DC and Boston are the two biggest public transportation over-achievers. Los Angeles, even though it has more public transit than most metros, is one of the biggest under-achievers, along with San Jose and Riverside. Click on the Los Angeles circle to see that nearly all of their public transit comes from bus, or click on the orange segment of the US map to see that western cities fall into two distinct trends of public transit vs. density.

The last visual gives us an idea of how a city's transit use is changing. Raleigh has more than doubled their transit use in the past twelve years, but their current rate (as represented by color-coding) is only 0.02 per capita, so the actual increase was slight. Scrolling down the graphs and looking for color outliers shows that Salt Lake City, Seattle, and New York City all had impressive gains in metro use.

Learn About Tableau

Atlanta's public transit use declined by 9% over the past twelve years and was the only city to see a decline in heavy rail usage. Where does this put Atlanta going forward?

This post is about public transit, but what really matters is quality of life. I don't actually drive everywhere; I live in the Old Fourth Ward and can walk to great coffee shops and parks. I have a ten minute driving commute to my office downtown. Atlanta's Beltline project and related push for mixed use development should make a lifestyle of walkable neighborhoods and short commutes accessible for more people. And as that happens I expect Atlanta to grow in density and public transit.

Notes

• All population information is from the 2010 census, and uses population-weighted density to be more meaningful. 
• Transportation data is from the American Public Transit Association, available on their website. (See the monthly data)
• The APTA uses urbanized areas (UZAs) to report usage, while I only had population-weighted densities for metro areas, which sometimes encompass multiple UZAs. I was able to merge the two with a name crosswalk, but did have to look up a few by hand.
• I suspect a reporting error in the 2002 APTA data for Austin. Their drop is entirely from 2002 to 2003, and in privately provided public busing.

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1 Calculations are totally based entirely on average population-weighted density, and not on actual stop locations.↩