Atlanta Awake

This map visualizes the median household income by station along Atlanta's MARTA system. It is inspired by The New Yorker's Inequality and New York's Subway Project. To build on the work of The New Yorker map, the initiative is in the process of developing an open-source library by which any census data for any city can be visualized over a transit network. This is the first usage of this library. Using median household income data from the census at the blockgroup level, researchers mapped the changes in income across each metro line. Station, line and route information was constructed from a GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) feed. A station neighborhood around each station was defined as a circle with radius of 0.5 mile was constructed. All block groups that intersect a station neighborhood were identified and the proportion of the intersection area to the block group area was used to weight the population for each block group. A weighted average of median incomes was calculated for each station neighborhood across the intersecting block groups.