This is not normal(ised)

“Sydney stations where commuters fall through gaps, get stuck in lifts” blares the headline. The story tells us that: Central Station, the city’s busiest, topped the list last year with about 54 people falling through gaps Wow! Wait a minute… Central Station, the city’s busiest Some poking around in the NSW Transport Open Data portal reveals how many people enter every Sydney train station on a “typical” day in 2016, 2017 and 2018. We could manipulate those numbers in various ways to estimate total, unique passengers for FY 2017-18 but I’m going to argue that the value as-is serves as a proxy variable for “station busyness”. Grabbing the numbers for 2017: library(tidyverse) tibble(station = c("Central", "Circular Quay", "Redfern"), falls = c(54, 34, 18), entries = c(118960, 27870, 30570)) %>% mutate(falls_per_entry = falls/entries) %>% select(-entries) %>% gather(Variable, Value, -station) %>% ggplot(aes(station, Value)) + geom_col() + facet_wrap(~Variable, scales = "free_y") Looks like Circular Quay has the bigger problem. Now we have a data story. More tourists? Maybe improve the signage. Deep in the comment thread, amidst the “only themselves to blame” crowd, one person gets it:
Source: What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate - Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Tags: australian news statistics smh trains transport Source Type: blogs