Tucson Streetcar Analysis
At The New York Times Student Journalism Institute in Tucson, AZ during Summer 2015, I considered the question, “have patterns of business development in Tucson changed with the introduction of the new streetcar system?” To begin exploring the answer to this question, I scraped all available data on business licenses issued by the City of Tucson going back to 2011. The analysis included combining, cleaning, geocoding and filtering the businesses by proximity to streetcar stations. The locations of streetcar stations were extracted from Google Transit Feed Specification data.
The analysis was carried out over the course of approximately a week using a combination of standard command-line tools and R. The work led to a graphic that appeared in the print and online editions of the Institute’s publication as part of a news package on the streetcar, along with a methodological blog post that appeared online. The code used for the analysis was released to the public via a GitHub repository.