Does how many people take subway in NYC?
Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) reported that 8.55 million people live in NYC and MTA serves about 2.7 billion trips every year to people in NYC. Subway is one of the main public transportations, and the number of people who use subway station has huge influence on the business near them. This post analyzed that what stations are busiest, when, and what time.
MTA provides turnstile data for each station. They are available at: web.mta.info.
There are multiple turnstiles in a station and they count number of people for entries and exits and report the number every 4 hours. MTA data contains station name, turnstile number, date, time, number of entries, and number of exits. Raw data from MTA webpage look like below.
<Raw data from MTA webpage>
The last two columns are the counts for entries and exits, and they are not the number of people during the last 4 hours, but they are accumulated data. Each time stamp needs to be subtracted by the previous time to calculate the actual traffic during the 4 hours. Sometimes the counts reset to zero after maintenance or what ever reason, therefore the data should be monitored and cleaned up before the analysis.
A plot above shows the top 10 stations that have the most people for entries on a day.
Two plots below shows the daily and hourly time series of entries for three stations.
Weekdays have more traffic than weekends, and 19:00 has a peak. The peak at 19:00 means that the number of entries between 15:00 and 19:00. From the two plots, we can assume that people stay in downtown New York during daytime, and go back to their home after work.
MTA stated that 85% of people around NYC need public transportation to commute. There are many tourists in NYC and it is difficult to track their usage of subway. However, it is obvious that commuters are the main customer of subway during weekdays from the data.
