Daniela Carmona
Data Journalism
SEPT. 29 2014
Assignment 1
Public Train Lines
The article,
Size matters: What Berlin’s rapid transit would look like in Toronto, published
on the Global News by Leslie young, talks about how the public transportation
in Berlin is much more advanced and congested than in Toronto. Young points out
that the biggest difference is the population size and also explains that it
would be very difficult.
Young was doing
a two-month Arthur F Burns fellowship based in Berlin, Germany. As this story
is told in a first person narrative, it makes it easy to understand and to
compare it to public train transportation in other cities with personal
experiences.
The article
gives a detailed mapping of the train lines in Toronto. It also compares Berlin
and Toronto with statistics of the population, number of stations, number of
lines, length of track (km), daily ridership, city Area (sq.km), % of
population who take public transit to work. Over all Berlin shows its necessity
for a bigger and wider transportation system.
This is a news
story that could potentially be done here in Vancouver. First, the journalist
would have to contact the Vancouver Translink to get all the information
needed, such as number of stations, lines and amount of people boarding the trains
daily. I don’t believe that there would
be too much restriction of this kind of information, and it will be attainable
as it was in Toronto and Berlin Also, it is necessary to revise Google maps, as
done in this article for Toronto, to obtain the images and data of the train
tracks in Vancouver.
Furthermore, if I was the journalist who wanted to recreate this story here in Vancouver, a great comparison of train lines would be to the busy city of New York. Since I lived in New York for 7 years and in Vancouver for much longer, I can compared with first hand experiences how, in a sense chaotic but fluid, train lines can be in over populated city with multiple train lines, compared to Vancouver.
This story was
simple and easy to follow; I believe it did a good job telling the story using
statistics and maps. Moreover, telling the story through experience made it
believable and easy to compare to our transit situation here in Vancouver.
Data Story: Size matters: What Berlin’s rapid trasit would look like in Toronto URL:http://globalnews.ca/news/1498993/size-matters-what-berlins-rapid-transit-would-look-like-in-toronto/
