Netflixography

The New York Times raided Netflix's queue data and came up with this:



It shows Netflix rental patterns by zipcode in twelve great American cities, plus Dallas. Shown above is the popularity of Gus Van Sant's Milk in New York City. They've got maps for the current top 50 rentals for every zip code in all 13 cities, which is kind of nuts.

A few patterns tend to recur. In particular (based on my limited knowledge of the geography of these cities, especially NYC, which I know best) a lot of titles seem to fit into one of three categories:

Movies that are popular in wealthy urban areas: the yuppie and hipster neighborhoods. Includes Burn After Reading, The Wrestler, Milk (they're not big fans in surburban Atlanta), Revolutionary Road (but suburbs, too), Rachel Getting Married, Pineapple Express, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, W., Sunshine Cleaning, Religulous, Man on Wire, and Mad Men: Season 1.

Movies that are popular in poorer or working class urban areas . Includes Seven Pounds, Twilight, Body of Lies, Eagle Eye, The Soloist, Wanted, Pride and Glory, Push, Obsessed, Transporter 3 (never heard of this franchise), The Taking of Pelham 123 (only 31st most popular in Pelham), and RocknRolla.

Movies that are popular in suburbs. Includes Gran Torino, The Proposal, Mall Cop, Taken (never heard of it), Defiance, Nights in Rodanthe (city people hate it!), Yes Man, Marley and Me, Last Chance Harvey, Australia, and Bride Wars.

Lots of movies don't fit any of those patterns, of course, including I Love You, Man, The Dark Knight, and Watchmen. New in Town is just hugely popular in Minneapolis and nowhere else. And The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is inexplicably popular pretty much everywhere.

The Yuppie Map of San Francisco

Town Me, a community website for San Francisco, takes the always fascinating project of demographic sub-group cartography (and you may take it as a mark on my character, for good or bad, that that was a non-ironic use of the word 'fascinating') and cleverizes it. Here, for instance, is the Yuppie map of San Francisco:



What they've done here is take an arcane sociodemographic category and translated it into a more sensible terms. In this case, "Yuppies" represent "young professionals (ages 25-35) who make $100,000 or more." They've given a similar treatment to several other categories, which they describe as follows:

Cougars - Single or divorced women ages 35-50
Sugar Daddies - Single or divorced men ages 45-60
Starving Students - People ages 18-34 currently enrolled in college
Baby Momma - Female householder, no husband present, with children aged 18 or under
Baby Daddy - Male householder, no wife present, with children aged 18 or under
People Overextending Themselves on Rent - People who spend a lot on rent

The only thing I might change here would be that rather unmellifluous last category; maybe they could change it to "Housing Crises"? Or the "Upwardly Immobile"? Regardless, as a fan of the English language, I always glory to see arcane and abstruse semiotic formulations reconstituted as more quotidian, but invariably more vividly delineative, linguistic signifiers.

Carbon Footprints, Transit Ridership and More

Via Good, the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index has some excellent maps for several dozen US metros that pertain to housing, transportation, and energy issues. This one shows CO2 emissions from auto use per capita in the New York City area:



The numbers go way, way down as you move towards the urban center. Of course, most people in New York City don't even own cars. But maybe a bit more surprisingly, the pattern is almost as striking in cities where sprawl is rampant. Here's Atlanta, for instance:



The gray lines are freeways and the black lines are Marta rail lines. It looks like per capita CO2 use is highest both along the Marta lines and near freeways; in the case of the latter, that's presumably because the sprawl is somewhat more dense near freeways. But, of course, the general rule is that the closer you are to the city center, the smaller your carbon footprint.

There are many, many more maps here on a number of variables pertaining to housing and transportation. To pick one at random, here's transit ridership as a percentage of workers in the Bay Area:



There's much more like this - average rents, gasoline expenses, travel time to work, etc.; it's a ton of information that's both fascinating and useful. And all in map form. If you're like me, in other words, this site has the potential to waste a tremendous amount of your time.

BART vs. Metrorail: How (and How Not) to Build a Subway

Yesterday's post reminded me of a question I've had occasion to ask myself: what's the deal with BART? That's the urban rail system in the San Francisco Bay area; it's always noted as one of the most significant urban rail systems in the US, it has a huge number of track-miles, and supposedly the 5th highest ridership in the country, and yet... I've been to the Bay Area several times, and BART just doesn't seem very present. It's not a great way for visitors to get around the city and you rarely come across stations unless you're seeking them out. So what gives?

Christof Spieler atIntermodality, the blog of Houston's Citizen's Transportation Coalition, may have the answer:



San Francisco's BART is on the left; DC's Metrorail is on the right. They're shown at the same scale, which reveals both the similarities and differences between the two systems. Says Spieler:

Rail transit projects don’t come with control groups — we can’t clone a section of a city, build two different rail lines, and compare the results. In this case, though, there’s an interesting comparison to be made between two remarkably similar rail systems.

San Francisco is in the 5th largest metropolitan area in the country. Washington DC is in the 4th largest. Both cities have old, urban cores with major employment centers surrounded by extensive post-war suburban development. In the 1960s, both decided to build a heavy rail system. And not only do those two systems use very similar technology, they are nearly the same length (104 miles vs. 106 miles).

There is one significant difference between San Francisco’s BART and Washington’s Metrorail, though: Washington has 2 1/2 times the ridership (902,100 average weekday boardings compared to 338,100.) Why? I’ve lived in both places, and I’ve ridden both systems. And I think the difference is that BART is primarily a suburban system while Metrorail, even though it serves the suburbs as well, is at its heart a urban system.

Spieler explains the difference:

BART serves the suburbs. Metrorail serves the suburbs and the urban core.
BART’s furthest station is 25 miles from downtown SF as the crow flies, across two small mountain ranges. Metrorail’s furthest station is 15 miles from the center of DC.
BART has a single line through the city of San Francisco. It serves Downtown and one urban neighborhood, the Mission... Metrorail has 5 lines through Washington, serving many neighborhoods in all parts of DC. Metrorail also serves many more suburban employment centers than BART does...

BART saves money by using existing rights of way; Metrorail maximizes ridership by puting lines where the transit demand is...Only the San Francisco subway, a two-station subway in Downtown Oakland and a three-station subway in Berkeley [don't use existing rights-of-way]. The latter — which serves the University of California along with Downtown Berkeley — was built only because the city contributed money; BART planners wanted to put the station a mile from the edge of the UC campus. Metrorail uses some existing rail lines and a Virginia freeway corridor, but the majority of the system is in subway alignments that serve neighborhoods and employment centers...

BART stations are where the cars are; Metrorail stations are where the people are. The vast majority of BART stations are car-oriented. The “typical” BART station is an elevated structure surrounded by park-and-ride lots in a low-density neighborhood. Over half of Metrorail stations, by contrast, don’t even offer parking. These stations serve employment centers (urban and suburban), universities, neighborhood crossroads, and residential areas...

Spieler posts a couple more maps to illustrate this last point:



I've used both systems, and there's just no competition: the Metrorail is a lot more convenient for getting around DC. And it actually extends significantly into the surrounding suburbs, so it's not like it's useless for commuters; but that seems to be the primary function of BART. And that's how you end up with systems of similar lengths, but one of which has 2 1/2 times the ridership of the other: one was built for people, the other was built for cars.

Actually, considering that pretty much everything we've done in the US to develop our cities since WWII has been designed primarily for the use of cars, rather than people, it's sort of miraculous that the DC system got built the way it did. Here's hoping that the designers of future mass transit systems are receptive to the lesson that the differing histories of BART and Metrorail provide.

The Most Photographed Places in the World

A team of Cornell researchers has developed a method for mapping out the locations of about 35 million images from Flickr. The resultant visualizations, as described in their paper (pdf), look like this image, which shows the locations where Flickr photos were taken, and includes representative images of the most photographed landmarks in the 20 most photographed cities in Europe.



The goal of their work is to "investigate the interplay between structure and content — using text tags and image features for content analysis and geospatial information for structural analysis." In other words, all photographs are of places; it therefore makes sense to organize them spatially, i.e., with maps. Furthermore, this information can be combined with the subjects of photographs to, as the researchers put it, create

a fascinating picture of what the world is paying attention to. In the case of global photo collections, it means that we can discover, through collective behavior, what people consider to be the most significant landmarks both in the world and within specific cities; which cities are most photographed; which cities have the highest and lowest proportions of attention drawing landmarks; which views of these landmarks are the most characteristic; and how people move through cities and regions as they visit different locations within them. These resulting views of the data add to an emerging theme in which planetary-scale datasets provide insight into different kinds of human activity — in this case those based on images; on locales, landmarks, and focal points scattered throughout the world; and on the ways in which people are drawn to them.

The researchers analyze photos taken at the levels of both metropolitan areas and individual landmarks. They can determine, for instance, that the seven most photographed landmarks in the world are

1. The Eiffel Tower
2. Trafalgar Square
3. Tate Modern Art Museum
4. Big Ben
5. Notre Dame Cathedral
6. The London Eye
7. The Empire State Building

They can also rank landmarks within cities; the three most photographed places in Boston, for instance, are Fenway Park, Trinity Church, and Faneuil Hall.

The ten most photographed cities, meanwhile, are

1. New York
2. London
3. San Francisco
4. Paris
5. Los Angeles
6. Chicago
7. Washington
8. Seattle
9. Rome
10. Amsterdam

Another interesting product of their work is that, using time stamps on photos, they're able to approximate the routes traveled by Flickr photographers.

Geotagged and timestamped photos on Flickr create something like the output of a rudimentary GPS tracking device: every time a photo is taken, we have an observation of where a particular person is at a particular moment of time. By aggregating this data together over many people, we can reconstruct the typical pathways that people take as they move around a geospatial region. For example, Figure 1 shows such diagrams for Manhattan and the San Francisco Bay area. To produce these figures, we plotted the geolocated coordinates of sequences of images taken by the same user, sorted by time, for which consecutive photos were no more than 30 minutes apart. We also discarded outliers caused by inaccurate timestamps or geolocations. In the figure we have superimposed the resulting diagrams on city maps for ease of visualization.

The top image shows pathways through Manhattan; the densest movement appears to be through Midtown and the Times Square area, with a secondary area of popularity in Lower Manhattan and across the Brooklyn Bridge. The bottom image shows pathways in the San Francisco Bay area; downtown appears to be popular, as well as the trendy neighborhoods of Nob Hill, Russian Hill, North Beach, and the touristy Fisherman's Wharf. Golden Gate Bridge and what looks to be the University of California at Berkeley are secondary nodes of interest.

This is all very reminiscent of what the folks at Columbia were trying to do in describing the geography of buzz; it depends on the same principle that we can learn something about what places are important by analyzing what places people are paying attention to, and we can do that by looking at what places people are taking pictures of. It's a clever idea, and an example, I think, of how the digitization of information is allowing us to have an exceptionally more fine-grained understanding of not just the world itself, but also of how we look at the world. But it also recalls something from Don DeLillo's novel White Noisein which a bridge somewhere in the Midwest is famous for being the most photographed bridge in the world. In other words, it's famous just because it's famous; and the experience of perceiving the object - famous for being perceived - becomes a weirdly important moment for the perceiver in that it authenticates the perceiver's sense of belonging in society and in history (what Umberto Eco might call a hyperreal moment). And I think it's true that people find it important, for whatever reason, to document their perception of highly-perceived objects like the Eiffel Tower - your photo of the Eiffel Tower is the "proof" that you've been to Paris; it's a token of a certain sort of experience, not because the Eiffel Tower is itself important, or particularly interesting to you, but because it is an iconic representation which many people can relate to precisely because it is a famous image with which people are familiar; it is, in short, famous for being famous. (Look at the images of landmarks on postcards at any sidewalk vendor in the world for other examples of images which have this same function of authenticating one's experience of a place.) But if this is the case, then I don't think the authors of this paper are justified in claiming that what they've documented is "what people are paying attention to," because taking a photograph of something is not necessarily a significant act of "paying attention to" something. Rather, it is often the more trivial act of doing something like documenting your perception of the most often perceived bridge in the world; it is a documentation of your having seen something which is famous for being seen. So at the end of the day, these researchers' exercise has a certain circular quality: it is documenting what places people are paying attention to based on what places people believe are being paid attention to. It's sort of interesting to have such documentation; but it doesn't amount to a documentation of what places are "most important," or even of what places people are paying most attention to. If people are genuinely focused on some object, after all, in most cases they probably wouldn't even think to photograph it.

Walkability of US Cities

The very nice site Walk Score not only lists the 40 largest US cities by walkability, it provides heat maps of all of them so you can see where the most walkable neighborhoods are. Here, for instance, is Seattle:



And this is what the walk scores mean:

* 90–100 = Walkers' Paradise: Most errands can be accomplished on foot and many people get by without owning a car.
* 70–89 = Very Walkable: It's possible to get by without owning a car.
* 50–69 = Somewhat Walkable: Some stores and amenities are within walking distance, but many everyday trips still require a bike, public transportation, or car.
* 25–49 = Car-Dependent: Only a few destinations are within easy walking range. For most errands, driving or public transportation is a must.
* 0–24 = Car-Dependent (Driving Only): Virtually no neighborhood destinations within walking range. You can walk from your house to your car!

Seattle, by the way, is the 6th most walkable city in the US. Top honors go to San Francisco, followed, not unpredictably, by New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia; Washington, DC is seventh and Portland is 10th. More surprising, maybe, is that Long Beach and Los Angeles come in at 8th and 9th respectively, despite the latter's epitomization of car-centric development. And the least walkable city in America? Jacksonville, Florida. (By the way, I have a pet theory that Jacksonville doesn't actually exist.)

The methodology does have one flaw, though. The rankings are based on an average within a city's borders, which introduces an element of arbitrariness. For instance, San Francisco actually has a pretty tiny land area; the urban conurbation extends well beyond its political borders, and almost all of the measured area is part of the urban core. Whereas El Paso, for instance - though it wouldn't be ranked high by any measure - is given an even worse ranking due to the fact that much of the area within its city limits is actually comprised of an uninhabited mountain range, driving down its walkability average. (UPDATE: Oops - turns out I was wrong about this. From Walk Score's methodology page: "We weight the Walk Score of each point by population density so that the walkability rankings reflect where people live and so that neighborhoods/cities do not have lower Walk Scores because of parks, bodies of water, etc." However, using city limits still does introduce some level of arbitrariness, since city limits of older and denser cities, like San Francisco and Boston, tend to be smaller, encompassing only the urban core; whereas a lot of younger Sun Beltish cities, like Houston or, indeed, El Paso, have incorporated suburbs. And that drives the walkability average up for the older, denser cities (which are the most walkable anyway, by and large) and drives it down for the (already less walkable) newer, sprawlier cities. So there you go.)

Still, the maps are great; I think it might be the single best measure of the success of urban communities, simply because it measures the extent to which cities are built for people, rather than for cars - and people are, you know, sort of the raison d'etre of urban environments. Now if only they had maps for cities in other countries - the comparisons would be fascinating.

Freeway Dreams: Failed Efforts to Destroy Urban America

It's well known that in the middle of the 20th Century, the US went on an absolute binge of freeway construction. It's been good for commerce and the construction industry, but the unintended consequences for cities have been severe: the destruction of vibrant urban communities to make way for freeways; the inexorable spread of suburban placelessness; traffic jams; pollution. Particularly pernicious were the frequent instances of low-income or minority neighborhoods being leveled to make way for these high-speed commuter roads out to the suburbs. If you have urbanist tendencies, you probably see the freeway system as the greatest crime committed against urban design in the last century. Seen from this perspective, it's easy to look back at the 1950s and '60s as a time when the freeway builders, and their urban planning patrons such as Robert Moses, had unchecked power to will the demolition of whole neighborhoods.

But there were actually all sorts of concerted efforts to stop the bulldozers in those days; and what's more, these freeway revolts even succeeded on occasion, as discussed at Greater Greater Washington. See, for instance, this plan to thoroughly cross-hatch San Francisco with freeways. In the face of public pressure, which began as early as 1955, more than 80% of these roads never got built:



In fact, San Francisco continues to tear down what freeways it does have within its city limits; its the only major city to lose freeway miles since 1990.

There was a major plan to build an inner ring in Boston, too:



Public opposition put the kibosh on that one in the early seventies. (The only portion of the plan that was completed - the Central Artery - became a notorious eyesore, and was itself demolished in the nineties and re-built underground in a project known as the Big Dig, which project was itself an enormous debacle for all sorts of reasons. So you see that the original freeway plan set off a sort of catalytic chain of fiascos.)

Other places weren't so fortunate; in Houston, among many other cities, an inner ring was built around the central business district, coincidentally enough running right through some of the city's most historic black neighborhoods. Funny how that always seemed to happen with these freeway plans. Though even some minority neighborhoods mounted successful efforts to fight off the highwaymen, even in Houston itself, where the Harrisburg Freeway, which would have bisected the city's mostly Hispanic East End was scuttled. And the campaign in Washington, DC that spawned this announcement was also a success:



Jane Jacobs led the fight against freeways in New York, though her great urbanist screed, The Death and Life of Great American Cities,wasn't published until 1961, and the tide didn't turn against Robert Moses & co.'s freeway plans for NYC until they had mostly been enacted. Only the finishing touches on the city's freeway sytem - the dashed lines in the map below, plus the Lower Manhattan Freeway that would have obliterated most of SoHo and the Lower East Side - were halted.



Despite Moses' success in re-building the city as a place for cars rather than people, New York is still the most thoroughgoingly urban city in North America, with the largest and arguably most successful public transit system. That is either a testament to New York's resilience in the face of efforts to re-shape it, or an indictment of the rest of America's cities for failing to provide successful urban environments for their people.

UPDATE: A commenter links to a map of Portland's thwarted freeways. The city, which had commissioned none other than Robert Moses to design its highway plan, was definitely at the vanguard of the freeway revolt movement. The author of that post makes a good point:

We’re lucky to have escaped the fate of many other cities — but I hope we are not getting ready, with the Columbia River Crossing project and all the stimulus spending in our near future, to make some of the same mistakes that we avoided forty years ago.