Taipei Metro Ridership
Interactive Data Visualization
Time
Tool
Fall 2018
R Studio
Introduction
This project utilizes the techniques and concepts of data visualization to visualize the data
collected by Taipei Metro. There are three levels of visualization in this project:
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The global visualization over 23 years,
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The specific comparison of ridership between New Year’s Eves and year averages
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The day-level graph showing the hourly changes in ridership on New Year’s Eves.
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The visualization clearly shows the growth in ridership of Taipei Metro and the high ridership on New Year’s Eves, which enables the users to understand more about the ridership of Taipei Metro.
Targetted Audience
The general public (especially Taipei citizens and the tourists)
Purpose
Let the audience...
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Understand more about the evolution of the Taipei Metro.
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Discover what events caused abnormal ridership.
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Explore the fluctuations in ridership on New Year's Eves.
Visualization Techniques
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Include Interactivity using animation, time slider, and details on demand (e.g. hover on elements to reveal more information).
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Use captions to provide guidance on how to interact with the charts and how to interpret the charts. e.g. In the first tab, the caption below the line chart hints that the users should hover their mouse over the lines, while the caption of the bar chart describes the meaning of the bar in blue.
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Highlight charts with color, reference lines, and shade areas.
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The spatial proximity and the same y-axis scale between the line chart and bar chart (in "The Growth" tab) support the users to make comparisons. Having both the global-view line chart and the local-view bar chart helps orientate, too.
Overview of Visualization
There are three tabs in the shiny app, each visualizes data of a different level.
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The first tab "The Growth"
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This tab consists of four elements:
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Line chart (top left): This chart is the focus. It shows the main message – ridership increased over 23 years – of this visualization project.
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Control panel (bottom left): Users can select specific years, what to show in the bottom right panel, and the language of the chronicles.
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Bar chart (top right): Provides more detailed information in each year.
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Route Evolution Graphs & Chronicles (bottom right): Provide more detailed information in each year.
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Users are encouraged to interact with this app to discover interesting patterns. The key findings are mentioned in the titles and annotated properly. This prompts the users to look at the specific spots and guide them to the second and third tabs. Note that I didn’t add the labels of the reference lines directly because I don’t want to reveal the interesting fact so quickly. I hope to both engage and inform the users.
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The second tab "New Year's Eves"
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In this tab, I use a bar chart to emphasize that the ridership on New Year’s Eves were a lot higher than the yearly averages. The purpose of this chart is to urge the users to take a closer look at the next tab.
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The third tab "What Happened?"
The upper part uses a rectangle to represent the Taipei metro system. Each blue dot represents 15 people, and the alpha (which controls the transparency) of the dots is set to 0.12 so that the blue would become darker when the ridership is high. This visualization aims to offer a feeling tone. Neither the height of bars nor the peaks in line charts can convey the crowded feeling of the data, so I created this “system density plot”. In addition, the label of the slider is “Pick a time!” instead of “Time” because I wish to make this visualization more interesting and engaging.
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The lower part uses a line chart to show the fluctuation of ridership on December 30th and New Year’s Eve. Compared to the “system density plot”, the line chart offers a more statistical view of data. The color choice of the lines follows the concept that “darker blue means more people” in the “system density plot”. Therefore, I used light blue instead of gray to represent the fluctuation on December 30th. (In the previous tabs, I used blue to highlight the focus, and gray to represent the others.) As for the choice of blue as the main color of my project is due to the branding identity of the Taipei Metro.
