Very cool looking graphs but omg I’m having a hard time reading them. I get that it’s saying everybody in the US drives and people elsewhere walk and use public transit but… I can’t wrap my brain around the figures
Well this is dataisbeautiful, not dataiseasytoread 🤷
It’s not beautiful when it’s confusing and badly presented
Do you have a better method in mind?
We say the data is beautiful, not the way it is presented
It is good as a visual representation of the global, but you basically have to read each side of the triangle individually to grasp it well. The middle of the triangle means a perfectly equal distribution and the vertices mean 100% of one of the three characteristics.
No offense to the citizens, but USA is a failed Capitalist experiment. Nothing really works optimally, or even close to it. Everything is backwards, wasteful, unjust, non-free, anti-democratic, and in general several hundred years behind more mature nations…
Europe had an advantage on designing walkable cities by building them when there wasn’t another option.
Much of the US was settled by cars and air conditioning.
To quote Not Just Bikes: “the USA wasn’t built for cars, it was destroyed for cars”
Most cities in the US were walkable and public transport oriented, but in the fifties all livable neighborhoods and city centers were bulldozed to make place for parking lots and arterial roads.
Yes and no. Lots of the smaller towns were already fairly spread out because they were agriculturally-based towns, so the property sizes were huge. But many of the big, old cities still have excellent public transit.
About 20 years ars ago I flew to New England on a trip and was able to get between and around everywhere I needed within Baltimore, DC, and Pittsburg using trains and public transit, very very easily.
In Texas that simply isn’t possible because most of the cities here are so spread out. The Texas Triangle is an urban population center with the population of New York City, but spread over 60,000 square miles instead of 300.
Disagree, the U.S. does a lot of things right which quietly go unnoticed because the failures are fun to point out (“haha Richie rich state is failing loool”). All countries have their issues, and the U.S. desperately needs market socialism.
But please give me an example of any other top GDP country in the world where immigrants can become elected officials (not president) at the federal level. Russia? China? India? All of the other examples in top GDP earners are inherently xenophobic.
Isn’t the british premier a first generation descendant?
Over here in Germany, one federal minister is of Turkish origin.
The current president of Romania is part of a German minority.
Granted, the examples all have a lower GDP than India and China overall, but those are three examples that come to mind without even googling.
You’re right, and Germany is actually higher than India. I don’t recall why I worded my original post that way, I think I was thinking of countries tankies admire and which also have strong GDP.
Regardless yes, you’re right that there are other strong GDP democracies besides the U.S. where immigrants can become politicians at the federal level.
Is there a source for the data? I’d love to include the charts in some materials we’re building for transit advocacy, and knowing the sources would help ensure successful distribution.
I love the concept of this figure, and I like how the right panel is built to present, but the actual results mapped onto the triangle are hard to figure out. Like this is the actual experiment they ran , but its not clear what represents what. Seems like maybe a density map might be more appropriate.
It’s very dense but once you get it I feel like it’s pretty clear and easy to read
These ternary plots are also commonly used for compositional data, e.g. for displaying a property of a three component mixture. Its three components shall always sum up to 100 %, thus the axes are increasing in opposite directions to each other.
They are common and yet I still really struggle to quickly understand what any points but the three extremes mean. I’m not sure there’s an alternative though.
Took me a minute to fully parse, I’ll try to explain
Each edge of the triangle is 0-100% of each mode, thus the center is 33% of each mode because of the skew in the ‘grid’.
Then the thickness/color represents the population, the data just happens to work that there’s a strong correlation between population and change in modal percent, making the constant gradients.
This makes sense in principle but none the less I still feel my self struggling to quickly see the difference between to points on these plots.
The graphs on the left convey essencially the same information. It would be a lot more interesting to see where individual nations/cities sit within the ternary graph
my problem is that from any node there are two possible lines to an edgezand I’m never sure which is the correct one
Right this is the thing I cant ever seems to quickly get.
once you get it (…) it’s pretty clear
Thats… thats not what that means.
Well, I like it. Yes, it requires some time, but overall makes a lot of sense as a comparison. I would have left the 794 cities part out of the graphic to see more clearly the difference between the USA and outside the USA, but I guess you wanted to show it for some specific reason. That part was the only one I had to “guess” by adding the n value for USA plus the one for non-USA cities.
This is ugly
Population: 1, 10, 100 (100,000 people)
Can ye not
In agreement with the other comments, this is indeed a very dense diagram, specifically the right-side. Focusing on that some more, my chief concern is that this novel triangle representation is very easy to misread.
Let’s take the dot in the middle which has the arrow with “10M”. What would you say the car percentage for that dot is? The axis along the bottom of the triangle is labeled 0 to 100%, and the dot is just to the right of the 50% demarcation. So maybe 52% or 55% seems reasonable, yeah?
But the axis is deceiving: notice how the demarcation are all slanted at the bottom. The dot is actually representing about 42%, since although the axis is marked horizontally, the line which is 50% slopes north-east rather than straight up. You can see the 50% number itself is actually rotated 60 degrees counter-clockwise.
The public transit axis on the left of the triangle has its demarcations tilted clockwise by 60 degrees as well. Only the active transport axis matches the conventional Y axis.
For that UI/UX reason alone, I wouldn’t endorse this as a “great” depiction of statistical data. If a diagram can – intentionally or not – be used to mislead a casual reader, it’s not one we should put up on a pedestal.
I also had a gripe about the successive colors not being consistent for each mode of transport, but that’s minor and easily corrected. The tilted axes may require some reworking though.
