Very cool looking graphs but omg I'm having a hard time reading them. I get that it's saying everybody in the US drives and people elsewhere walk and use public transit but... I can't wrap my brain around the figures
It is good as a visual representation of the global, but you basically have to read each side of the triangle individually to grasp it well. The middle of the triangle means a perfectly equal distribution and the vertices mean 100% of one of the three characteristics.
No offense to the citizens, but USA is a failed Capitalist experiment. Nothing really works optimally, or even close to it. Everything is backwards, wasteful, unjust, non-free, anti-democratic, and in general several hundred years behind more mature nations..
To quote Not Just Bikes: “the USA wasn’t built for cars, it was destroyed for cars”
Most cities in the US were walkable and public transport oriented, but in the fifties all livable neighborhoods and city centers were bulldozed to make place for parking lots and arterial roads.
Disagree, the U.S. does a lot of things right which quietly go unnoticed because the failures are fun to point out (“haha Richie rich state is failing loool”). All countries have their issues, and the U.S. desperately needs market socialism.
But please give me an example of any other top GDP country in the world where immigrants can become elected officials (not president) at the federal level. Russia? China? India? All of the other examples in top GDP earners are inherently xenophobic.
Is there a source for the data? I'd love to include the charts in some materials we're building for transit advocacy, and knowing the sources would help ensure successful distribution.
I love the concept of this figure, and I like how the right panel is built to present, but the actual results mapped onto the triangle are hard to figure out. Like this is the actual experiment they ran , but its not clear what represents what. Seems like maybe a density map might be more appropriate.
These ternary plots are also commonly used for compositional data, e.g. for displaying a property of a three component mixture. Its three components shall always sum up to 100 %, thus the axes are increasing in opposite directions to each other.
Well, I like it. Yes, it requires some time, but overall makes a lot of sense as a comparison. I would have left the 794 cities part out of the graphic to see more clearly the difference between the USA and outside the USA, but I guess you wanted to show it for some specific reason. That part was the only one I had to "guess" by adding the n value for USA plus the one for non-USA cities.
In agreement with the other comments, this is indeed a very dense diagram, specifically the right-side. Focusing on that some more, my chief concern is that this novel triangle representation is very easy to misread.
Let's take the dot in the middle which has the arrow with "10M". What would you say the car percentage for that dot is? The axis along the bottom of the triangle is labeled 0 to 100%, and the dot is just to the right of the 50% demarcation. So maybe 52% or 55% seems reasonable, yeah?
But the axis is deceiving: notice how the demarcation are all slanted at the bottom. The dot is actually representing about 42%, since although the axis is marked horizontally, the line which is 50% slopes north-east rather than straight up. You can see the 50% number itself is actually rotated 60 degrees counter-clockwise.
The public transit axis on the left of the triangle has its demarcations tilted clockwise by 60 degrees as well. Only the active transport axis matches the conventional Y axis.
For that UI/UX reason alone, I wouldn't endorse this as a "great" depiction of statistical data. If a diagram can -- intentionally or not -- be used to mislead a casual reader, it's not one we should put up on a pedestal.
I also had a gripe about the successive colors not being consistent for each mode of transport, but that's minor and easily corrected. The tilted axes may require some reworking though.