As an example, take this map I created of New Bedford, Massachusetts. It gives us a pretty unambiguous picture of two things: which parts of the city have higher percentages of foreign-born populations, and where we’d be likely to find significant pockets of linguistic isolation. The former is displayed in the fill colors of the city’s Census tracts, while the latter is shown by the color of the glowing border that appears when the viewer mouses over a tract:

But really, that’s all that it tells us. Part of that is a design choice: when you’re doing data visualization, the most important consideration is ensuring that your audience can easily read and understand your representation. Cluttering it up with too much data will get in the way of that. Clean and simple is the way to go, which is why I designed this map the way that I did.

Which is great, but what if we wanted to know if large foreign-born populations are correlated with large groups of linguistically-isolated people? We’d have no way to determine that from this map, which means that a map would be the wrong choice to answer that particular question.

Instead, you’d need something like this:

This scatterplot was made using exactly the same data as the map above. But on the map, the goal was to show the relationship between each variable and space. And since I wanted to show a relationship (if any) between the two variables themselves, I needed a new way to look at the data.

(As you can see, there does not appear to be any real statistical relationship happening here. But I encourage you to surf over to the scatterplot and check it out for yourself. It’s interactive and everything.)

I did something similar with this histogram of Detroit’s population loss between 1970 and 2010. There we can see the huge population declines in Wayne County’s Census tracts, but we also see a couple other interesting things. First, Wayne County actually had a decent number of Census tracts that more than doubled in population density during those years of the Detroit Diaspora. And second, almost all the population movement in metro Detroit seemed to take place at the extremes. A lot of tracts lost a lot of people, a surprising number gained a ton of people, but relatively few grew at a slower, steadier rate (by which I mean, gaining people but not quite doubling). We might have been able to get a sense of those trends from the map, but a histogram does a better job of quantifying these effects.

All of which is a long-winded way to say that the form of any data visualization should be determined by the question you’re asking and the data you have to work with – and not by the institutionalized preferences of your field.

For months, Tampa developer Al Austin has maintained that chairing the organization that staged the Republican National Convention would be the final major project of his long career in business and politics.

Today, after reviewing the 2012 Tampa Bay Host Committee’s success in exceeding its $55 million fund-raising goal, Austin said he now has one more goal: Help bring light rail to Tampa …

Now he wants to build on the groundwork for improving Tampa’s mobility and its economic development efforts that he said were jumpstarted by hosting the convention and the 50,000 visitors it drew.

“There’s one key area we need to go next – we have to have light rail,” Austin said.

Al Austin is a unique bird. He’s long been one of the Bay area’s movers and shakers in Republican Party politics, which means he and I don’t really see eye-to-eye on most things. But unlike so many Republicans, he eschews the ideological war on transit – instead, he actually seems to recognize the boost that local businesses would get from an improved transportation infrastructure.

He’s even talking about making it easier for cities to tax themselves as part of the referendum process, so that repeats of Tampa’s 2010 light rail initiative debacle are unlikely … wait, are we sure this guy is a Republican?

Perhaps this is a Nixon-to-China moment: only a bona fide Republican could get other Republicans to even consider the benefits of having a light rail system.

I’m not generally a fan of the Benevolent Rich Guy theory of politics. But it’s not like Austin is offering to buy us a light rail system if we promise to look after it. Instead, he’s talking about using his influence and connections to make good things happen. And if that includes undoing some of the damage caused by the GOP’s hyperactive anti-transit rhetoric, well, I’m on board with that.

Drew Reed at thisbigcity has a post about the idea of transit culture, as kind of a yin to car culture’s yang. He gets at an important point, but doesn’t quite close the circle:

How we travel is more than a simple choice of how to get around, it is a part of how we see ourselves, and a way we relate to the people around us …

The sense of community is a critical part of building transit ridership, almost as important as the service itself. If people feel their choice of transportation isolates them from their peers, they will go out of their way to avoid it. On the other hand, a strong perception of community around a mode of transportation will actually draw users in.

He points to Buenos Aires, where he lives, as an example of a city with a deeply ingrained transit culture, where the local transit agencies have no concerns about boosting ridership.

What he doesn’t really speak to is why, exactly, we can’t (or won’t) grow a transit culture here in the US. But I think he nails it in the first sentence in that blockquote above. How we get around is a part of how we see ourselves. But in most of the United States, the only available transit mode is the bus – and all too often, people see riding the bus as something poor people do.

And who wants that as a self-image?

We’ve spent a long time building our car culture in the US. A big part of that was the advertising-driven (and completely insulting) idea that what you drive says something about who you are. It’s bullshit, of course, but advertising is a powerful force, and the idea took root quickly.

But if what you drive says something about who you are, what does it say about you if you don’t even drive? Does driving nothing make you nothing?

Of course not. But at some level, we think it does, which means that in order to create a transit culture, we have to first undo the transit stigma we’ve slowly built over the last five or six decades. And not just for “cool” transit modes like light rail and streetcars – that’s too easy, mainly because those modes weren’t really ever uncool to begin with.

But then again, we don’t actually have to make riding the bus cool for this to happen. We just have to make it not not cool anymore. Which is still a pretty tall order.

They decrease walkability. They lower air quality and raise noise pollution levels. They cut neighborhoods off from the rest of the city, leaving them to wither and die on the other side of eight lanes of congestion and madness. They’re bad for business.

We know all these things. They’ve been obvious for years now. So why, then, is Louisville actually planning to increase highway lanes through downtown?

The fact that any large city in America today would opt for more highway lanes downtown is eyebrow-raising in and of itself (well, okay, I can imagine Tampa doing it without a second thought). But the most mind-boggling aspect of this plan is that city leaders apparently know full well that urbanism is the preferred lifestyle now. In fact, that’s a direct quote I lifted from the linked article. It was uttered by Ted Smith, the city’s director of economic growth and innovation: “Urbanism is the preferred lifestyle now.”

So why the disconnect? Apparently, the problem stems from the construction of a ring road around the city, designed to ease problems with congestion and accidents. Business leaders are afraid that ring road will send jobs and money to neighboring Indiana unless it simultaneously becomes easier to get to downtown via car.

Sadly, this isn’t a problem that’s going to be easy to solve. Louisville is highly car-dependent. It’s also not particularly walkable – it ranks near the bottom in walk scores for the fifty largest American cities, and even does worse than pedestrian-hostile Tampa. But it does have a downtown that has been showing signs of rebirth over the last several years, a rebirth that would likely be snuffed out by new highway lanes.

Louisville seems to be one of those cities that has reached a critical mass of car dependency: it’s not walkable, there’s very little transit to speak of, and so the only way anyone can conceive of solving traffic problems is to add lanes.

In Long Beach, California, the question of whether to add extra lanes is unfolding in a completely different way. There the question revolves around an extension (or “gap closure,” depending on which side of the issue you’re on) of the 710 freeway.

The debate over the 710 is much different from what’s happening in Louisville. There, it’s more a question of how best to move commuters from points outward to downtown in such a way that allows jobs to stay put and downtown to become more accommodating, walkable and healthy. Once upon a time, with a little bit of forethought, that could have been accomplished without highways by building a solid public transit system.

But in Long Beach, there’s another wrinkle: Long Beach is the largest port on the west coast, the spot where countless goods from Japan, China and other points to the west are assimilated into the American economy. And while trains carry most of the weight now, some residents and politicians are worried that freight companies will see trucks as the more economical hauling option if and when the 710 extension opens.

That certainly couldn’t help the air quality in southern California, which is already among the nation’s worst:

“We look at ourselves; we’re fighting the Port of Los Angeles and we’re fighting the 710,” Long Beach resident John Cross said. “We’re like David and Goliath, only my deal is we should just find the right rock to hit them with. We’re gonna keep chucking rocks ’til we find the right one.”

Since 1961 Cross has lived in what he calls “the diesel death zone.” To the neighborhood’s east is the 710 Freeway. To its west are refineries and the Union Pacific rail yard.

“And the prevailing winds are coming from the west, so whatever pollution goes down this freeway or comes down out of those rail yards goes right into our communities,” he said.

Obviously, the problems in this particular neighborhood go deeper than just too many cars. The refineries and the rail yard are also causing significant damage to the lungs of Cross and his neighbors. But certainly, adding more emissions is not the answer.

South Pasadena Mayor Michael Cacciotti … believes completing the freeway — even if it’s an underground tunnel that preserves historic homes — will only bring more cars and more congestion, extending Cross’ “diesel death zone” into the San Gabriel Valley.

Cacciotti, also a board member for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, said Caltrans’ 1993 completion of the Century (105) Freeway in the South Bay is a prime example of what could happen on the 710.

“Within two weeks of opening it was bumper to bumper in rush hour,” he said.

“Traffic patterns move to the open areas.”

They do indeed. And it’s foolish to think that logic doesn’t apply to freight, especially if it’s cheaper to ship it by road than by rail.

Louisville and Long Beach show us that it’s not always so easy to just get rid of highways. There are historical, economic and political facets to these decisions, and it’s not always easy to break free of them. True, the situation in Long Beach is more complex than the issues Louisville faces, and effective transit alone would not solve the problems of traffic congestion and poor air quality. But transit is almost always part of the solution to grinding traffic problems; the problem is that any effective transit-based solution requires years of advance planning. Once problems like these crop up, it’s most likely too late … or too expensive.

Anyway, I noticed something last week that struck me as interesting. Everyone knows that Detroit was the so-called Murder Capital of America for a while in the 1980s; it was so bad for a while that the Detroit Police Department was solving less than 40 percent of all homicides committed there. Naturally, Detroit is also the poster child for urban abandonment, having lost more than a million residents since 1950.

But in going over statistics and other materials for some other cities I’m looking at, it hit me. Take a look at the 2010 violent crime statistics on Wikipedia. Scroll down to the table and sort it by the murder rate, in descending order. The four cities with the highest murder rates per 100,000 residents – New Orleans, St. Louis, Baltimore and Detroit – have all lost a ton of people since the 1950s. The same year that Detroit was at its peak – 1950, when it had 1.8 million residents and was the fifth-largest city in America – Baltimore was the sixth-largest city in the country, with almost exactly half Detroit’s population; St. Louis wasn’t far behind at number 8, with about 850,000 people.

What does this mean? Is there a relationship between crime and depopulation? I think there is, but I don’t think it goes in the direction that you might assume. To me – and I haven’t done any deep statistical analyses yet, so this is just an off-the-cuff musing – it looks like depopulation may have actually caused those high crime rates, or at least contributed to them.

That makes sense, if you think about it. When people move out of a city en masse, they take the city’s tax base with them. Without that revenue, cities have to cut services to the bone – including police and public safety.

One of the most common excuses for White Flight was that the cities were getting too dangerous, and that the suburbs offered a safer and calmer way of life. Could it be that this was an after-the-fact rationalization?

What do you think?

So when I read that Apple had shut Google Maps out of the iOS6 operating system, I silently thanked the universe that I have an Android instead:

After kicking Google Maps off its new mobile operating system for the iPhone and iPad, iOS 6, Apple is receiving massive backlash from users around the globe, who report that Apple’s replacement maps, “Apple Maps,” are riddled with strange glitches, inaccurate direction and location data, and fall short of Google Maps.

Accuracy is by far the most important feature of a map. Yes, it’s a form of communication that can be quite rich in meaning, but smartphone maps are more utilitarian in nature. People need very specific information from a smartphone map, and if you insist on displacing the industry leader because they happen to be an industry rival of yours, well, you’d better make sure you can deliver a comparable experience first.

It seems Apple didn’t do this, which sucks for their users. Here’s hoping they find their way out of this mess – but I’d recommend using Google Maps to do it.

But no longer. Now we have research and data on our side in the battle against cheap Chinese-made plastic gewgaws and deplorable labor practices:

“No matter which direction you go from Walmart, there’s a very high rate of business closures in the immediate vicinity, and the further away you get there’s less and less,” says University of Illinois Chicago economics professor Joe Persky, one of the authors of the study, which was just published in Economic Development Quarterly.

Farther out from the store, about four miles or so, the rate of closure is about average, or roughly 24 percent of small businesses, according to Persky. “Small businesses often close. They have a high turnover.”

But the closer a store was to the Walmart location, the greater the likelihood it would close. Persky and his colleagues found that for every mile closer to the Walmart, 6 percent more stores closed. Close in around the store’s location, between 35 and 60 percent of stores closed.

Walmart has long presented itself as an engine of economic growth, which is an argument the company invariably makes whenever its plans to open a store are not just actually threatened, but even slightly inconvenienced in some way. Here in St. Petersburg, Walmart demanded – and got – tax breaks for building a new Sam’s Club store on a site they claimed was more expensive than they’d anticipated because the groundwater beneath the site was contaminated by chlorinated pollutants. They pressured the city to designate the site a brownfield site, so that the company could qualify for huge tax breaks – the same strategy, it turns out, they followed four years ago for a new Walmart on the corner of 34th Street and 1st Avenue North.

Walmart neglected to explain how, exactly, chlorine-polluted groundwater would make it more expensive for them to build a Sam’s Club on that site. Well, perhaps “neglected” is too strong a word. They probably just felt that threatening to take their ball – and their low-paying jobs – back home to Arkansas was a better strategy. And apparently, they were right.

Honestly, I think the city would have come out ahead if they’d given the tax break money to local unemployed people directly. If the jobs Walmart creates are simply going to result in the destruction of other jobs, then what interest does the city have in paying Walmart a rebate to open a store here?

Meanwhile, about 200 miles to the south, residents of Miami’s Midtown neighborhood refused to roll over for Walmart‘s plans to change the nature of their entire neighborhood by adding a cargo bay to a proposed store there. The cargo bay would have opened up onto a main thoroughfare; residents were naturally worried about the traffic problems such a facility would inevitably bring. But at a hearing on the subject, locals brought up Walmart’s business-killing reputation as well:

For much of this year Walmart and adversaries have dueled over building in Midtown. A store there would be one of only a few the world’s largest retailer has built in an urban core. Plans are in place for similar outlets in Chicago and the Washington D.C. areas.

The retailer says a shop at Midtown could mean up to 350 jobs, and would add another variety of retail to a growing neighborhood that could well absorb it. Proponents say they don’t need the behemoth that sucks the life out of nearby small businesses and doesn’t fit with new cool motif of central Miami …

[Said] Raymond Machado, executive director of the Wynwood Homeowners Association: “In Wynwood we’ve lived with nothing but drugs, so we’re used to traffic. We want this project for the sake of the community, and jobs.”

I don’t know anything about Wynwood, but I can understand Machado’s position. In fact, I agree with him: having a Walmart in your neighborhood is definitely preferable to having a local economy built on the illegal drug trade.

For a few weeks now, I’d been struggling with a way to do exactly that. I wanted to make a map of New Bedford, Massachusetts (where I spent two long years when I was in the Coast Guard, back in the 1990s) that showed two things: where the city’s foreign-born residents tended to cluster; and where the city’s linguistically-isolated populations were.

(In this context, I’m using “linguistically isolated” to mean people who speak English poorly or not at all. I suspect linguists would argue with my use of the term in this way, but it’s my blog and I’ll do what I wanna.)

It made sense to me that these populations would overlap – that Census tracts with high percentages of foreign-born residents would also have higher levels of linguistic isolation among those communities. By displaying both variables at the same time, the map would be able to quickly confirm or refute that hypothesis – if they didn’t step all over each other, that is.

It’s the kind of problem webmapping is made for. A static map in ArcGIS or QGIS would have to display all the data points from both variables, all the time – which could get messy in a hurry. But because you can animate a web-based map, it’s easy enough to just switch data on and off as needed.

And that’s the approach I took. I used the fill color to represent the percentage of people living in each Census tract who were born in other countries, which is simple enough. Those colors are fixed. But when you mouse over each tract, the outline will change color, depending on how much of the foriegn-born population speaks poor or no English.

That way, you can clearly see both variables at once, and they don’t get in each other’s way. It’s easy to pick out patterns in the data – and to see that my hypothesis doesn’t really hold water. There doesn’t seem to be much, if any, of the geographic correlation I had expected to find. Oh well.  Clearly, there’s more to understanding linguistic isolation patterns than simply knowing who was born where.

But I never would have known that without the map.

The share of new cars purchased by those aged 18-34 dropped 30% in the last five years, according to the car shopping web site Edmunds.com.

Some say the economy is mostly to blame — that the young aren’t buying because they’ve been particularly hard hit by the recession.

But others say the trend could be part of larger social shifts.

One reason is demographic: The re-urbanization of America is giving more people access to public transportation. The advent of Zipcar and other car-on-demand businesses is eliminating the need to own and insure an expensive vehicle that often isn’t driven much.

But mostly it’s the explosion of social media. Car ownership just may not be as socially important as it used to be … This is particularly true for the youngest, most digitally-connected members of Generation Y. Forty-six percent of 18-24 year-olds would choose Internet access over owning a car, according to a recent Deloitte study.

This is a good thing.

Nobody should have to buy a car to be able to participate in American society. If someone wants to buy a car and drive it everywhere, well, that’s their decision. It’s not a choice I would make, but I have no problem if someone else chooses it for himself or herself.

But until the last few years, making the choice not to have a car has had profound effects on one’s ability to live a rewarding life, to the point where it wasn’t even really an option for the vast majority of Americans. With the re-urbanization of America, that’s changing. And it’s changing with the lifestyle choices these young people are making now.

The car industry, naturally, is afraid. They’re afraid that we might figure out that life can be better without a car.

[Michelle] Krebs [an analyst at Edmunds.com] said the drop in sales share by young people is misleading, as more of them are buying used cars or simply living at home longer and using their parents’ vehicles. When the economy improves, they will be back en masse.

“We don’t all live in urban areas and can get by without a car,” she said …

Young people may defer buying cars until the economy improves or they may live out their 20s in urban areas, but at some point they will have families, move to the suburbs and need vehicles, said Erich Merkle, Ford’s U.S. sales analyst.

With all due respect, these people are missing the point.

There’s a growing number of people who don’t want to move to the suburbs – and yes, many of them either already have kids or want them someday. The life goals of previous generations aren’t as ubiquitous as they once were, and the revitalization of our cities means that young people who find suburbia stultifying and deadening don’t have to squeeze themselves into an environment that doesn’t fit them. Our cities aren’t the desolate, decaying places they once were. Young people are going to keep getting older in cities, and as that happens, they’re going to keep trying to make them better places to live – for young and old, for parents and the childless, for pretty much everyone.

People like Krebs and Merkle are living in the past now. I don’t expect the suburbs to ever disappear, of course. But neither do I expect to see all – or even most – of today’s young city dwellers flocking out to gated subdivisions and golf course communities.

* Yes, I know that “alright” is incorrect. It looks ignorant to me, and I personally hate the fact that it seems to be replacing the correct “all right” as the de facto standard usage in this country. But that’s how The Who wrote it on the cover of their famous album of the same name, so after much anguish, I left it wrong.

I’ve heard people speculating that this may be the first sign of the long-awaited turnaround in the real estate market. But I’m not so sure. I worry that national trends in real estate may be working against a healthy, sustainable real estate recovery in Florida.

As I’ve said before, Florida was designed for cars, not for people. It’s very difficult and expensive to retro-fit car-centric cities to accommodate a more pedestrian-based lifestyle:

In all, the Washington [DC] region now leads the nation with 43 distinct neighborhoods Leinberger has identified as “regionally significant walkable urban places” (in other words, those walkable places that also help power the metro economy as jobs centers). A mere .9 percent of the land in the entire Washington region is currently devoted to such places. But 34 percent of the region’s jobs are located there. And these places, Leinberger argues, represent the future of cities everywhere – for the coming wave of development in residential construction, in office space, in entertainment and in retail …

“This is about the urbanization of the suburbs,” he says.

Tampa Bay was one of the hardest-hit metro areas by the real estate collapse. We are just now starting to show some signs of recovery. Will it last?

Not if walkable urbanism is more than a passing fad. Clearly, this area is not designed to be friendly for pedestrians – hell, our *cities* aren’t even designed to accommodate walking, let alone our suburbs, and retrofitting either to accommodate walkability promises to be a long and expensive undertaking. Our examples of New Urbanism are often greenfield developments, making them isolated and car-dependent – in other words, just suburbs with a different aesthetic.

What do you think? Is walkable urbanism the wave of the future? Will Florida’s cities be able to adapt to the changing tastes of home buyers?