NYC Subway Open Data

I created a fun visualization and interactive map of all the subway stops in New York City! I use them to illustrate how your sense of directions get warped when you're on the island of Manhattan.

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Inspiration

The New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is having their open data challenge and I just moved to New York so I am pretty obsessed with the city and the subway! I think it is so cool that most people use north and south to describe the top and bottom of the island of Manhattan even though it is in fact pretty skewed from the actual cardinal directions. I wanted to create a visualization of just how skewed in direction the island is.

What it does

It shows how when you are on the island of Manhattan, locations on the "west" side of the island aren't really west at all and they are actually much more east than you would imagine. There are also a couple other visualizations the user can click through!

How I built it

Using Leaflet JS! An easy and open source library to visualize maps.

Challenges I ran into

When you switch between the views of east/west and south/north I remove all the data points and then add the new ones and it took me forever to learn how to clear all the data points off of the map with leaflet.

Accomplishments that I am proud of

I did it a lot faster than I thought! I expected this to be at least 10 hours of coding and I think it was more like 3 which I am really excited about. My coding speed is something I have been working on a lot the past year.

What I learned

Leaflet is extremely fast. It is reading over 2 thousand data points from a json file and then plotting them and it does it so fast. It's instant.

What's next for my NYC MTA Open Data project

I want to try to add some popups or tooltips for the various stations, I could include their human readable station names.

What was built before this hackathon and what was built as part of it

I want to make it clear that my personal site (https://www.mandymeindersma.com/) was built entirely before the hackathon but anything under the MTAOpenDataChallenge/ is new. Here are all the files I wrote for this hackathon: https://github.com/MandyMeindersma/MandyMeindersma.github.io/tree/master/MTAOpenDataChallenge

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