Visualizing the Impact of Mega-Storms on Transit

With eerie regularity, New York City has experienced a late summer/early fall freakish storm for each of the last three years. In September of 2010, there was the microburst paired with two tornadoes that touched down in Brooklyn and Queens. Then, in August of 2011 came Hurricane Irene. And, of course, last October, Superstorm Sandy inundated the city, paralyzing whole parts of the region for days.

The below data visualization, created by Eric Schles and Thomas Levine, tracks the impact each of those storms had on the city's transit system. The little black lines, which appear as squiggles on an earthquake seismogram, illustrate turnstile entries into New York's subway system from every entrance in the network (one continuous line represents one entry point). The regular waves of passenger traffic capture the flow of week days (peaks) and weekends (troughs).