If you had to guess what Metro station usage looks like over the course of a weekday you’d probably expect to see two spikes in use — one in the morning and one in the evening once the work day is over. The whole system is built to accommodate this assumption, though you can certainly argue about how well it does that.
You might also expect to see the two spikes occur in different areas of the system — suburban (residential) stations seeing more entries in the morning and downtown (commercial) stations seeing more entries in the afternoon.
Got that picture in your mind? Great. Now go check out these Metro station usage data visualizations on Greater Greater Washington. They’re mesmerizing.
Here, for example, is the red line over the course of an average weekday:
Red line station entries over the course of a weekday. (Graphic via Greater Greater Washington)
John Ricco and Tarun Narasimhan created these visualizations using data from WMATA’s PlanItMetro blog. Their full post on Greater Greater Washington features similar graphics for the blue, orange, yellow, green and silver lines, too — each showing some distinct trends.
We can’t stop staring.
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