Gymnastics in urban mathematics.
The NYC Toilet Challenge: A 579-Mile Marathon Nobody Asked For Did you not make it into the NYC marathon this year? I have an alternative for you… If you have the right mixture of ambition and questionable GI state, then here is a route that connects all of NYC’s public restrooms for you: In total it is a mere ~579 miles as the crow flies. At 100 calories per mile, that is 57,900 calories…
Got to go? NYC has about 1066 public restrooms that might be of use to you. Thanks to pretty meticulous record keeping we can get some insight into how well the restrooms service the city. Let’s dive in! Overall 1066 restrooms sounds like a lot, but in fact it is pretty low for a city the size of NYC. Looking at the 100 biggest cities in the US, NYC is ranked 93rd in terms of restroom availability…
You are lying on a blanket in the park, soaking up the rays, watching kids run around, and you reach over to find… broken glass? If you have been in the city long enough you have had an experience like this. Our parks are usually beautiful communal spaces, but it is impossible for them to escape the tradedy of the commons - good news though, since 2017 NYC has been collecting inspection records of…
I preface this by admitting I am very late to the game - I have seemingly had my head buried in the sand as all of the LinkNYC stations went up around the city. It is not that I was not aware of them - they are nearly impossible to miss, with their digital ad displays, tablets (occasionally flashing explicit material …), and dubious looking plugs. I had not asked “why” though - and so here is what…
According to OpenData’s daycare inspection dataset , there are 2,948 daycare providers in NYC. That includes infant daycares, school based programs, and camps. Brooklyn has the lionshare of daycare centers - 1,255, or roughly 43% of all the daycare centers, with Manhattan coming in second (732, or 24%), and The Bronx third (430, or 14%). Here is how the daycare centers are distributed around the…
NYC, like any city, has rats, and a lot of them - a study done in 2014 estimated that there are around 2 million rats who call NYC home. Most of those rats are the exotic Norwegian Rat (spoiler, they most likely did not actually come from Norway). But thanks to NYC’s Open Data portal, we can learn a lot more about our furry little cohabitants. We can start by filtering the 311 data data to see the…
The NY state legislature’s voting record exposes an odd fact: they all almost always agree. The Open States Project organizes all of the available legislative voting data, so you can pull it down and see for yourself. For the past six years, in all but a handful of cases, every bill introduced for a floor vote is passed and usually with a margin of about 90%. How could this be? Here is the…
Sometimes when it is hot out there is nothing more refreshing than escaping the heat in the shade of a tree. Luckily, in NYC there are thousands of trees planted along our streets, and NYC has done a great job in distributing them around the city. And better yet - thanks to the efforts of TreeCount NYC , we know the exact location and health of all of them! The tree count is done once every 10…
Its summer time, and that means its time to leave the city and head to the mountains, trails, cliffs, and rivers. First stop - Catskills! For today’s analysis let’s look at the rental market in the lower Catskills region. AirBnB has transformed the vacation rental market there in the past couple of years, but what drives a good rental property on AirBnB? What factors in that area lead to a…
A quick tour through different neighborhoods in Brooklyn will take you through decades of construction and building styles. Thanks to the NYC OpenData project, and the Pluto dataset, we can put some numbers on exactly how old the builds are throughout our fair borough. Turns out, overall, Brooklyn clocks in with the oldest original construction date amongst all the boroughs of NYC - with a median…