The Subway Stories team (from left: Jediah Katz, Marc Zitelli, Julia Han) and Lisa Mae Fiedler (far right), head of the MTA Open Data initiative. Photo: Jack Delaney
By Jack Delaney | jdelaney@queensledger.com
“What a wonderful group of nerds we’ve put together in one room!”
It was true: on a dismally cold Thursday night, a sold-out crowd had come to the NYC Transit Museum to listen to panelists — led by Lisa Mae Fiedler, manager of the MTA Open Data program and the evening’s first speaker — talk about maps, graphs, and charts.
But their passion was infectious, even for a layperson. A central motif of the night was how data visualizations and more personal modes of storytelling, such as interviews, can inform each other. Fiedler illustrated this point with a particularly timely case study: subway crime.
“My dad is here with his girlfriend,” said Fiedler. “And if anyone here has family from out of town, I think you are very familiar with the conversation — how could you possibly ride transit? It’s so dangerous on the subway, all of this crime is happening!” Anecdotes often seem to support this conclusion, she noted, but the data tell another story. She gestured at a slide showing that in the past few years crimes have hovered around one per million riders, and are trending downwards.
A Shift Within the MTA
The concept of ‘open data’ has roots in the 1940s, when Robert King Merton advocated for the free dissemination of scientific research. The phrase was formalized in 2007, riding a wave of crowdsourced software and calls for a more democratic internet. That ethic steadily seeped into conversations about government, and in 2021 Governor Kathy Hochul signed the MTA Open Data Act, requiring the agency to make its datasets publicly available. “New Yorkers should be informed about the work government does for them every day,” Hochul said at the time, “but we have to make it easier for them to get that information.” The bill also established the role of a data coordinator, a position Fiedler has held since 2022.
The law’s lasting result was a website, intuitive to navigate and accessible by anyone. (“As a public agency, we want our data to be usable by more than just people who are extremely tech savvy,” explained Fiedler.) That portal now boasts over 150 datasets, ranging from hourly ridership at every subway station since 2020, to which stops have Wi-Fi, and even a catalog of the MTA’s permanent art collection dating back to 1980. Eventually, the team hopes to make the site itself open source, meaning that users can contribute code to beautify it.
The MTA, which was established in 1965, provides around 2.6 billion trips per year, encompassing an enormous number of commuters and correspondingly large batches of data. It’s technically an independent entity run by a 17-person board of governors, with members recommended by the governor, New York City’s mayor, and executives from counties in the exurbs. However, its datasets are kept on the state portal (data.ny.gov), rather than the city’s analogous site (opendata.cityofnewyork.us).
When it’s not preparing data, Fiedler’s team does outreach: collaborations with media outlets such as the New York Times, blog posts, and public events like the Transit Museum talk. Another initiative is the MTA Open Data Challenge, a competition that incites citizen data enthusiasts to create projects based on the MTA’s data. The winning entry for the inaugural installment last fall was “Art off the Rails” by Stephanie Dang, an interactive map that allows New Yorkers to explore which stations have art installations.
Sonder, Storytelling, and the City’s ‘Splendor’
The event’s next presenters — Jediah Katz, Marc Zitelli, and Julia Han — were finalists in the competition, who had created an interactive map of their own called “Subway Stories.” Judges voted the project the ‘most creative storytelling,’ and it was boosted by Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine.
Echoing Fiedler, Katz argued that some stories about New York are too wide-ranging to be told without data. “As tempting as it is to take our own personal experiences and apply them to this city of 8 million people,” he said, “we need to resist the urge to do that.” But a tension exists, Katz conceded, because individual accounts often resonate in a way that statistics can’t. “While data is really powerful for uncovering the truth of what’s happening,” he concluded, “narrative is much more powerful for actually convincing the public.”
Katz and his co-designers envisioned “Subway Stories” (subwaystories.nyc) as a marriage of the two modes. Their map tracks five separate narratives, exploring questions such as why many Chinese-Americans take early-morning trips from South Brooklyn to Manhattan’s Chinatown, and what the heavy evening traffic on the L train says about the city’s current most popular neighborhoods for nightlife. In each case, the trio said, the starting point was some aspect of the MTA’s ridership data, which they then illuminated with an interview.
For the Chinatown story, for example, Anna Lee of Bensonhurst emphasized that many people in her community travel to Chinatown to play volleyball or basketball, work in boba shops, or call on elderly relatives. The conversation revealed a hidden angle to the data: it would be rude, Lee said, to ask older family members to travel all the way to Brooklyn, which is partly why the northbound F train spikes when it does.
The designers also solicited bite-sized anecdotes, along the lines of the NYT’s Metropolitan Diary or the Subway Creatures account on Instagram. “When reading these glimpses into [people’s lives],” Han said, “we couldn’t help but feel a profound sense of sonder,” a term for the “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” She turned to the crowd, and asked if anyone wanted to share their own impromptu subway story. One man raised his hand — he had once spotted a high school acquaintance on the train, and texted them to ask where they were living now. They got out at his stop, and it turned out that their brother had been working in his office building, at his same company, for months: “Small world!”
During the Q&A, audience members were curious about how data collection could respect privacy, how long the project took to make, and (inevitably) the latest on congestion pricing. For Katz, the central lesson was about storytelling. “If there’s anything I want you to take away from tonight,” he said, “it’s that data is so powerful because it’s the only way to measure New York City in its massive and chaotic splendor. But divorced from context, it can just become another sea of meaningless numbers. Only by tying data back to its source, by making it feel relevant to people’s everyday experience, can we ever hope to convince anyone of what we have to say.”
And as the event wound down, there was a shared excitement about new tools that could be crafted using the portal. “I hope that after tonight’s talk you’ll feel inspired, if you haven’t been already, to check out MTA Open Data,” said Fiedler, closing things out. “Play around with one of our datasets, and build something cool.”
