Inequality and Mass Transit in the Bay Area

http://dangrover.github.io/sf-transit-inequality/

by dangrover • 13 years ago

184 133 13 years ago

dangrover.github.io

YokoZar• 13 years ago

Slightly more interesting to me would be the median income of a person getting off at a particular stop, rather than the folk who live there. Plenty of people work in the poorer parts of the city and live in relatively expensive neighborhoods, and plenty of people also do the inverse.

dangrover6• 13 years ago

Wish I could find that data. Some stops are weird because they're all hotels (Powell) or all businesses (Montgomery).

null_ptr• 13 years ago

Could we please get username.github.io subdomain support on HN? Unlike the old github.com, these are all user content so it makes sense to distinguish them just like for wordpress.com.

saraid2162• 13 years ago

I added this to the Feature Requests thread, but I have no clue if pg actually looks at that.

pg• 13 years ago

Ok.

kevingadd• 13 years ago

I've lived here for a few years and the median income in Redwood City still surprised me. Wow.

Click the Caltrain 'Local' route and see for yourself. I had to double-check it since it seemed so implausible to me, but it seems to be roughly accurate.

eande• 13 years ago

I am not sure where their data is pulled from, but the numbers are not correct, at least for Redwood City. http://www.city-data.com/city/Redwood-City-California.html Redwood City median income in 2009 was $67,611.

dangrover6• 13 years ago

Data is for the census tracts where the stops are located, which admittedly makes more sense for subway/streetcar/bus stops than commuter rail stops (where people drive from other tracts and park at the stations). The BART is particularly troublesome because it takes on characteristics of both types of transit.

A data science friend of mine said we should do a "watershed" model where we define an area where people flow into a stop, but I'm not sure how best to do that! Maybe someone smart can fork the project and improve on our methods.

jonemo2• 13 years ago

I also looked at the Redwood City data point and it's pretty clear that they are using incorrect data. Since I have been to Redwood City and am going to be living there permanently starting a few months from now, I was a little confused. Using this tool on ArcGIS [1] I was not able to find a single corridor that has such a low median household income anywhere near Redwood City. Note that they don't seem to use the most granular data level, but zoomed out I get the number as $45,568 for tract #060816102.02 as opposed to their $30,800. $45k is still low compared to the surrounding areas, but it's far away from $30k.

[1] http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?services=da76d...

dangrover6• 13 years ago

Hm, looking into that. I noticed that the lat/longs in the GTFS feeds can occasionally be off/inconsistent.

joshrotenberg• 13 years ago

typo in the first sentence:

"both extreme povery and wealth, ..."

bitanarch• 13 years ago

One thing I don't understand though - how can the people in Atherton afford their houses with "only" $200k income? (yea $200k is a lot, but those houses cost a freakin' lot more!)

fyi802• 13 years ago

200K income, you can easily afford to allocate 25% of that to a mortgage interest (plus 10% for principal, taxes, etc), $50K/year

3.5% mortgage -> 50K/yr * 100% / 3.5%/yr = $1.5M house price

interest rates are so low these days, you can spend 50% more on principal for the same interest, compared to 2006 when rates were ~6.25%.

mjn5• 13 years ago

I wonder if it would look different if you excluded long-time residents who bought in decades ago, when real-estate prices were much lower. E.g. what's the median income of a household that moved to Atherton in the past 20 years?

JimboOmega• 13 years ago

I have never understood how people with median household incomes afford anything in the city.

For instance, the image someone else already linked shows even the lowest rents at almost $2k: http://sfist.com/attachments/SFist_Brock/SF-Infographic.png

Yet the OP shows several downtown stops, like Powell St. and Civic Center as having less than $24k of income. That is, the average income is less than the average annual rent.

I have no idea how that possibly works.

binarycrusader• 13 years ago

One thing the graph doesn't represent is how often a particular train stop is serviced.

As an example, since (August?) of 2005, Atherton only has weekend and special event caltrain service. You could argue that shouldn't be surprising given the graph (median income of ~$193K), but it's still an important piece of missing information.

It would have been nice to see a graph based on total number of stops scheduled for a station overlaid with the median household income as it is currently graphed for caltrain.

wgoodwin• 13 years ago

Well done (I'd say better than the original).

One of the things I find most surprising is the data on the bus lines. I'd assumed, as a recent LA transplant, that the bus lines would generally serve worse off neighborhoods (it is always thus in LA; minority and lower income neighborhoods get mediocre bus service, while wealthier neighborhoods get expresses and light rail).

Of course, it would be interesting to overlay the stops of the various corporate buses on top of this information. My guess is all those high points have private alternatives serving them.

Final point: this might be best for the questions it raises. How does service compare across lines? How many people does a line move and how fast? How much is the line getting subsidized (BART, I'm guessing, crushes the others in that regard).

potatolicious• 13 years ago

The bus routes are indeed IMO the most interesting bits of the data.

The trick with San Francisco is that because of the buckshot nature of public housing developments in the city, poor areas as mixed in surprisingly evenly with wealthy areas. This creates a lot of negative effects for residents - the expensive and trendy Hayes Valley for example, is right next door to an extremely high-crime area, the Western Addition. Keep going a bit further and you hit the Fillmore, which is again a wealthy, trendy area.

SF does this at micro-scale. In a given neighborhood there can be extremely good blocks that are directly next to extremely bad blocks. It's not hard to walk 300 feet and end up in a completely different-seeming universe.

One thing that's interesting to note is that SF buses stop very often, so the highs and lows aren't really spread across a large geographic distance, they are often separate only by a block or two. The "cliffs" in the graph really are that steep when you project it onto a map.

glurgh• 13 years ago

Hayes Valley is arguably _in_ the Western Addition which, in turn, is not an extremely high-crime area, even in relation to the rest of SF.

The visualization does show drastic transitions but the majority of them seem to be the buses crossing the seedier areas of downtown which are, indeed, quite seedy.

aerolite• 13 years ago

The Western Addition is not an extremely high crime area.

guelo• 13 years ago

Having crime spread into rich neighborhoods instead of being concentrated in only poor neighborhoods seems like a positive for residents overall since the more affluent neighborhoods have more resources to deal with it. Unless when you say "residents" you mean only the rich ones like yourself.

kevinpet• 13 years ago

"The results show the Bay Area's economic inequality and its relationship with transit and urban form."

I'm not sure what they are supposed to show. It seems to show me that there's very little relationship between income and mass transit service.

johndavidback• 13 years ago

Agree: I assumed the chart would show that low income areas are less-served by transit stops, but that doesn't appear to be the case. It just shows that income wildly varies by stop..?

I'm confused as to what I'm meant to glean from this data.

patmcguire• 13 years ago

Yeah, the Bay Area has too many rich outer areas to make any sense of it. The one about New York from about a month ago is a lot more clear - rich center, poor periphery. http://www.newyorker.com/sandbox/business/subway.html

dangrover6• 13 years ago

I guess that was the point. Both places have inequality, but the Bay Area is wacky, and not so evenly covered with mass transit. And the mass transit that exists is fragmented between different agencies.

tomkarlo8• 13 years ago

In both NY and SF, if you keep going further out (beyond the base mass transit system) incomes start to rise again. There's basically the rich central city, the poorer surrounding "urban" neighborhoods, and then the rich suburbs. Chicago too.

throwaway19807• 13 years ago

Data aren't supposed to show anything. That's only if you're trying to push some kind of agenda, publish your work, or get funding.

Lambdanaut• 13 years ago

That doesn't really mean anything. Of course you can draw conclusions from data.

rhokstar• 13 years ago

I believe this is the reason. The accompanying article highlights socio-economic issues, not mass transportation problems.

newbie12• 13 years ago

Income and wealth are not the same thing. Wealth is a measure of total assets, while income is annual wages and investment income. A lot of high income people carry huge student loan and housing debt and are not wealthy.

mikeash2• 13 years ago

Housing debt won't drag your total assets down unless you happened to buy a house that's now underwater. The usual situation is for the difference of house value and mortgage amount to be significantly positive.

Income and wealth aren't the same thing, but they are highly correlated.

Afforess3• 13 years ago

>Income and wealth aren't the same thing, but they are highly correlated.

No they are not.

According to the US Treasury:

"These low realized rates of return call into serious question the use of realized income from capital as part of any measure of well-being or ability-to-pay. For owners of capital, economic income may have little relationship to realized income, and rates of realization may vary according to the assets they hold."

According to the Federal Reserve:

"...very wealthy people try quite hard to minimize their income."

[1] http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/tax-analy...

[2] http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/scf/files/wealthin...

run4yourlives7• 13 years ago

Just to add: Income to wealth correlation though is a matter of one being used to create another. The level of one's income has an impact on how easy it is to create wealth.

Aside from that though, the two should never be conflated. Many people are able to create wealth with small to moderate incomes, while higher income doesn't mean higher wealth if you also have high expenses.

bradleyjg4• 13 years ago

There are few student loan totals large enough to make what is otherwise considered "high income" not wealthy.

The difference in lifetime earning between two people, both of whom have a high five figure or low six figure income and good growth potential, one of whom has $150,000 in student loan debt, is not very large.

Housing debt isn't relevant unless to wealth unless the house in question is underwater.

Retric2• 13 years ago

Don't forget about lost earnings and interest. Med school followed by 250k job vs. 120k withought med school is not as clear of a win as you might think.

cmbaus• 13 years ago

I wish more people understood this, especially in regard to tax policy.

bconway• 13 years ago

Exactly this.

Likewise, many of us would be unable to pick out many/most of the Millionaires Next Door in a pinch.

dionidium4• 13 years ago

Person A starts with $0. Person B starts with $10,000 and spends it. Now they both have $0.

They are not equal.

YoukaiCountry• 13 years ago

That would depend on what person B spent the $10,000 on.

king_jester• 13 years ago

I don't see this as counter to income and wealth inequality. Certainly there are those with medium to high income whose debts put significant pressure on their lives, but having access to homes and higher education is a big part of the wealth and income inequality in the US, so even having access to those things already means you have a certain level of wealth or privilege that many poor people do not.

ultimoo• 13 years ago

Wow, the most striking is the sudden jump between Redwood City and Atherton on the Local Caltrain route. It jumps from ~30K straight to ~193K.

mjn5• 13 years ago

That's partly true, though the area right around the Redood City Caltrain (this uses census tracts, not the whole city) makes the difference much larger than if data for Redwood City as a whole was juxtaposed with Atherton as a whole. The area right around the Redwood City Caltrain is a bit sketchy, particularly on El Camino (the downtown on the other side is nicer). Not too sure why it hasn't gotten nicer, since it's so convenient to train service (30 mins from SoMA on the baby bullet Caltrain).

jonemo2• 13 years ago

See my comment above, the number they quote for Redwood City is $30k, the census data says $45k for the same tract number.

greesil• 13 years ago

Yes, Oakland is poor. Thanks for sharing.

dimva• 13 years ago

Is this median personal income, or median household income? The page doesn't make that clear.

dangrover6• 13 years ago

Median household.

irollboozers• 13 years ago

There are people on the Bayshore Express line living below the poverty line. Wow.

djcapelis5• 13 years ago

This isn't that surprising, Bayshore is not like most SF neighborhoods and has some interesting patterns.

jcomis• 13 years ago

Somewhat related: https://vimeo.com/63147860 a 24 hour visualization of SF public transport ridership. Each circle represents a stop.

fyi802• 13 years ago

Another horrible repeating of the "income inequality" trope, and then showing graphs of median income that don't get near the top l% of US earners, while citing a stat that the top 1% of earners are gaining.

djcapelis5• 13 years ago

Do you honestly expect whole census tracts to have median incomes at the level of the top percentile?

A factor of ten difference between census tracts in the same city is worth examining.

tomkarlo8• 13 years ago

Isn't that what you'd expect? There's a factor of ten difference these days between the poverty line and a fairly typical white-collar income (call it $120K.) Is it really surprising, or telling, that at the tract-level you'd find a factor of ten difference in a major city? Is there a major city where you don't see that?

frogpelt• 13 years ago

Found some data on the US Census website:

  Table H-1.  Income Limits for Each Fifth and Top 5 Percent of 
  All Households:  1967 to 2011						
  												  	
  Year		Lowest	Second	Third	Fourth	Top 5 percent			
  2011		20,262 	38,520 	62,434 	101,582 186,000 			
  1967 (adj)	19,931 	38,866 	55,164 	78,663 	126,232 			
  1967		 3,000 	 5,850 	 8,303 	11,840 	 19,000 				
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  Table H-2.  Share of Aggregate Income Received by Each Fifth and 
  Top 5 Percent of Households, All Races:  1967 to 2011			
  												  	
  Year	Lowest	Second	Third	Fourth	Highest	Top 5 percent
  2011	3.2 	 8.4 	14.3 	23.0 	51.1 	22.3 
  1967	4.0 	10.8 	17.3 	24.2 	43.6 	17.2 
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  Table H-3.  Mean Household Income Received by Each Fifth and 
  Top 5 Percent, All Races:  1967 to 2011						
  
  Year	   Lowest  Second  Third   Fourth  Highest  Top 5 percent
  2011	   11,239  29,204  49,842  80,080  178,020  311,444 
  1967 (adj) 10,630  29,452  47,018  65,787  118,393  186,758 
  1967	    1,600   4,433   7,077   9,902   17,820   28,110 
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------
  
  Table H-6.  Regions--All Races by Median and Mean Income: 1975 to 2011
  
  	Median income	  Mean income	
  	Current $ 2011 $  Current $  2011 $
  2011	50,054 	  50,054  69,677     69,677
  1975 	11,800 	  44,851  13,779     52,373
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------

This data indicates to me that the bottom 3/5ths of income earners earn about what they did 45 years ago if adjusted for inflation, while the top income earners have increased. The fact that the top 20% have increased their earnings drastically does not necessarily mean to me that there's a problem.

It simply means if you can break out of the slump and make your way into the top 20% of income earners that you will be more rewarded than you were 45 years ago.

paul9290• 13 years ago

I visited San Fran last week and with each visit I'm shocked by the plight of the homeless there.

I've lived(NYC, Philly & more)in and been in many cities across the US and never witnessed this on such a scale/epidemic.

It made me wonder what the government is doing there to help with what I see as an epidemic?

isalmon• 13 years ago

It's just warmer in SF comparing to NYC/Philly, so to me at comes as no surprise.

tlrobinson• 13 years ago

Giving people money to be homeless probably doesn't help.

"The city of San Francisco, California, due to its mild climate and its social programs that have provided cash payments for homeless individuals, is often considered the homelessness capital of the United States"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta...

tomkarlo8• 13 years ago

That wikipedia page is a train wreck. It's pretty clear there's an edit war going on between two political factions that are uninterested in keeping things factual. Wikipedia is great but in some situations the quality of the content goes way downhill at the hands of people with alternate agendas.

bluedino• 13 years ago

A lot of those people have mental illness and don't want to live in a home. And a lot of people go there with the intention of being homeless because they are treated fairly well by the city and there are lot of people to panhandle from or perform for.

tomkarlo8• 13 years ago

SF actually has a tiny homeless population compared to NY or LA, at least in number. But they're much more concentrated around the high-traffic Union Sq / Tenderloin area than most cities, and you also tend to cross paths with them more if you drive less. LA, by comparison, has a much bigger homeless population but you rarely see them when you live there, because they're spread out and you tend to drive by them rather than walking.

eli_gottlieb• 13 years ago

Ever been to Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA?

scottshapiro2• 13 years ago

Given the volume of Peninsula-shuttled tech workers living within a mile of 16th and 24th st bart stations, I'm surprised to see those so low. Garbage in, garbage out from census data for transient, high-rental areas like the Mission, Noe, Castro, Bernal, Potrero. Indexing to rental rates in these areas is likely more reflective of wealth (via affordance as a proxy) http://sfist.com/2013/03/07/map_average_rent_for_1br_in_san_.... Awesome visualization though.

azernik• 13 years ago

Within a mile doesn't matter - the OP is measuring by census tracts, which are quite small. For example, if you zoom in on this [http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/map], you'll see that the Mission BARTs' census tracts (201 and 209) extend to only within a couple of blocks from the stations, which seem from my daily commute to be the poorest and most run-down parts of that area. (The tracts are even small enough that there's a separate tract - 208 - for the stretch of Mission between the two BARTs.) While some of the tech workers I know do indeed live between Van Ness, Valencia, Cesar Chavez, and Market, a lot live a few blocks east or west of that line, e.g. on the west side of Valencia, or in the area between Folsom and Potrero.

A side question, though - is there a specific year when the shift of tech workers to SF picked up steam? I'm finding a wave of articles complaining about the Google shuttles in 2012-13 (about when I moved out to SF), but I don't have a good feel for how far along the process was at that point.

tomkarlo8• 13 years ago

People have been complaining about tech workers in SF for at least 15 years now (since the first boom). It's a standard (if not especially factually supported) gripe at this point.

It's possible that the proliferation of private busing has made it more visible to residents, however. It used to just be everyone drove.

scottshapiro2• 13 years ago

Fascinating.

Based on rapidly increasing rents over the past 2 years in these neighborhoods, tech worker density has increased a lot. Anyone living in these areas in 2009-2010 will tell you that they'll never break their lease because market rents are 50-150% more than what they're paying due to strict rent controls.

gweinberg• 13 years ago

A lot of the people that live near the stops in downtown San Francisco may be pretty poor, but I think most of the people using BART at those stops don't live there, they just work there.

nextstep• 13 years ago

It's cute that someone made this in response to the New Yorker piece. San Francisco always wants to feel like it's one of the big guys like NYC.

If anything, this transit/income data shows how little of a correlation there is between the two. This doesn't suprise me: most people in SF have cars, and muni/BART are embarrassingly awful compared to the big the cities in the US.

cmelbye2• 13 years ago

...what? Since when is the Bay Area not a "big" metro area?

tomkarlo8• 13 years ago

Don't let the guys from Boston troll you.

WildUtah3• 13 years ago

compared to the big the cities in the US

cities ==> city

The only big city in the USA with decent transit is NYC. San Francisco is comparable to Boston, DC, and Chicago and far ahead of LA, Dallas, and Miami.

By world standards, NYC is barely average and the rest of the country has no transit system at all to speak of.

tks21033• 13 years ago

by which metric is nyc barely average?

bradleyjg4• 13 years ago

London, Paris, Seoul, and Tokyo all shut down most of their mass transit system overnight. NYC runs it all night long (albeit with fewer trains and some diversions). By the important metric of availability that puts it among the top.

ruswick2• 13 years ago

Chicago ought not to be lumped in with Boston and DC. DC and Boston are both quite nice (comparatively).

The CTA is not. It's barely tolerable (and by tolerable, I mean that people are even capable of using it to get around and/or commute at all. So, the system might technically be a functioning transit apparatus, but barely.) I've used it daily for a sizable portion of my life, and it fails with remarkable consistency.

vineel• 13 years ago

I keep hearing that Muni and BART are awful, but how so? I've been on public transit in NYC, Boston, Berlin, and other major cities and I don't notice any significant disparities.

tome2• 13 years ago

I don't see what this has to do with mass transit. It seems to be a gimmick. Why not just plot this information with a (two-dimensional) heatmap?

dangrover6• 13 years ago

It is a gimmick, but if you're not a car person, your mental model of the place you live in is probably closer to a topological transit map, since you largely get around by hopping between nodes. It's easier to connect with data displayed that way. And it's also interesting to see what the areas are like near the nodes you pass by every day on your commute but don't get off at.

tome2• 13 years ago

A heatmap superimposed on a topological transit map would also have been fine. I just don't see what the one-dimensional version buys.

NelsonMinar• 13 years ago

Nice visualization, I particularly like the link between the income graph and the map on the upper right. Built using D3, TopoJSON, Bootstrap, Angular, and JQuery. (That's a lot of frameworks!)

cmelbye2• 13 years ago

I thought it was interesting how the CalTrain curve flattened out when you look at the bullet or limited service graphs instead of the local graph.

ZanyProgrammer2• 13 years ago

That's because Baby Bullets hit stations that tend to be in more affluent areas. Palo Alto, Mountain View, Redwood City, San Mateo, etc. Certainly Bayshore (Visitacion Valley) isn't dragging those down.

gcb0• 13 years ago

heh, you should try L.A.

the buses that go to the poor neighborhoods doesn't even ride on the main streets when in the good parts of the city. Also, the poor people buses have tinted windows!

if you can find maps, compare Metro ($1.25, short routes) routes with Dart ($0.75?, long routes) ones.

greghinch2• 13 years ago

I've been wondering a lot recently how long it will be until the Tenderloin is completely gentrified. If SF expansion remains unchecked, it has to be just a short time, as it's literally become a pocket of poverty surrounded by yuppies

WildUtah3• 13 years ago

It's been a pit of crime and poverty surrounded by opulence for twenty years now. The City's government works hard to preserve the Tenderloin as it is by blocking development and gentrification with building codes, tenant rights measures, permitting, policing strategies, homelessness subsidies, and more.

greghinch2• 13 years ago

The Mission has only fairly recently become young, white hipster-ville though. Soma seems to go up and down with the tech scene, so assuming the current growth isn't the same kind of bubble (I don't think it is), that is just going to continue to climb as well. Certainly if all those people gentrifying the surrounding areas stay put for any length of time, that kind of collective monetary influence is going to change any city policies that may keep the Tenderloin how it is

greggman• 13 years ago

The data seems a little suspect. For example the L line shows Montgomery Station has having low income. AFAICT there's (a) almost zero housing at Montgomery Station and if there is it's most likely super rich as it's directly in the Financial District.

My only point is before I can even try to get any meaning from this I need to know the data makes sense. Maybe there are a bunch of low income apartments near Montgomery Station but if so they sure are well hidden.

edit: Checking the Fremont line it shows the median income at Montgomery Station as $112k where as the L line shows the same station as $23k. Something seems wrong or else I don't understand what it's showing.

perryh2• 13 years ago

I also highly doubt that the median income for Union City is $138k/year.

charlieok• 13 years ago

If you follow many blogs of people in the data visualization community, you'll see right away how often they talk about an iterative process in drawing out a story.

There's a big exploratory component, where they investigate possible approaches and try and find something interesting they can show.

On the one hand, you want some significant features and relationships that exist in the data to be apparent to any intelligent reader who spends a little time studying your visualization.

On the other hand, you don't want to distort the data, or impose an interpretation on it that isn't warranted.

For a well-done visualization, there is definitely a lot more work going into the final product than simply plotting some dimensions against some other dimensions.

As an example, the New York Times pours a lot of money (and therefore talent and person-hours) into their visualization work. Some of the behind-the-scenes of that operation is blogged about here: http://chartsnthings.tumblr.com/

ZanyProgrammer2• 13 years ago

I'm a little disappointed, insofar as this data tells us nothing we don't already know-the area around Fremont BART is more affluent than Fruitvale, OMG! But it is a nice bit of data visualization, and I applaud them for that. I live in the Bay Area, develop software, and rely on public transit everyday. I definitely see improvements in what data should be presented.

For example, for Caltrain, break each graph down further. Find the number of passengers who board at Baby Bullets, NB and SB, for the weekday commutes. What you need is more demographic data about the riders of each system, at specific times. Anyone whose been on Caltrain can tell you that the weekday commute is very much a white collar commute. Finance, Law and Tech going north to SF, mostly tech going south to MV (by the time baby bullets get to SJ Diridon, they are very empty). Palo Alto is an outlier, a lot of people commute from points south to Stanford, which obviously isn't a tech company.

Having said that, since I really enjoy developing transit software, I'm really going to take a look at the code and see what I can do. Its a really good start, and I'm happy they posted it to HN.

Inequality and Mass Transit in the Bay Area

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