Christmas Shopping Strategy

When making Christmas shopping plans, it's best to start by systematizing your thinking.

New Neighborhood, Same Hobby

So I've moved to yet another Baltimore neighborhood, but like many urban neighborhoods I get frustrated by the litter I see when I walk around. Took a couple hours this afternoon and walked up and down the street picking up litter.

Results:

Given that my new neighborhood is a lot nicer than my old one it took a lot longer to pick up this much garbage. I did learn a few things about my neighborhood's litter patterns. Looks like a lot of the litter is due to single serving or individually wrapped junk food and discarded student bus passes. As you move farther from the middle/high school, the litter transitions to discarded take-out remnants and convenience store garbage. Litter peaked near the intersection with the main thoroughfare, likely because this is where vehicular douchebags have the most time to litter.

Overall, a much more pleasant experience than picking up garbage in my old neighborhood, where the overgrown city-owned property could fill up a garbage bag in 10 yards of deep cleaning. The only real problem I'm going to have is when my girlfriend gets home and discovered that our garbage can is completely full and we can't empty our own kitchen garbage can until Wednesday morning...

I actually believe that the biggest problem is that this is a long, well-travelled block with no public garbage receptacles. I'll have to see if I can call the city and have one put up. I think that the majority of litter is a crime of inopportunity - a combination of lots of foot traffic, single-serve junk food, and no garbage cans.

Admittedly, this is a pretty weak blog post, but after months of inactivity it's time to get back to writing about things that seem interesting.

Good News for Passenger Rail

I saw some really good news today, Amtrak believes that they're in for their busiest year ever in FY10! (previous record was set in FY08). What's interesting was that even in the depths of the worst recession in ages, it turns out that Amtrak scored it's 2nd-best ridership year in FY09 (Amtrak reports all of it's stats by government financial year, so FY09 was October 2008 to September 2009, so it really encompassed the financial crisis).

Last September I grabbed some data on Amtrak ridership in Maryland. Turns out that Amtrak still had old state fact sheets hosted on their website, just no links (found this out using Google), so I was able to pull up data all the way back to FY03. I've just added in the data for FY09 and thought I'd publish the data here (keep in mind that this is ridership data; where ridership = boardings + alightings, so if you buy a round-trip ticket you get counted twice):

Baltimore and BWI Rail Station dominate Maryland Station usage, but there is a sizable contingent from New Carrolton and a non-negligible usage at Aberdeen. Overall, the ridership grew by 6.2% at Maryland stations, but the individual station usage is more noisy. Ranging from Rockville's 70.58% increase to New Carrollton's -21.7%. I'd guess that changes in service patterns probably explain a lot of changes in New Carrollton, but I don't follow rail travel closely enough to know. It is really interesting that the two least used stations (Cumberland and Rockville) saw ~70% increases and both saw increased usage in FY09 vs FY08.

Another thing that you have to consider is that many, many people who technically live in Maryland use Union Station as their Amtrak station (it is the 2nd most used Amtrak station in the country). So I also took a look at how all the Maryland stations stacked up against Union Station:

Union Station saw a drop from FY08 to FY09, but certainly not as much as Maryland. I imagine this has something to do with the fact that Marylanders could drive or car pool instead of taking the train but people in DC don't own cars. Or maybe it reflects all the bank executives that had to take the train to DC for bail-outs.

Even though travel to-from Union Station dwarfs travel to-from Maryland stations, there just aren't many states that use Amtrak as much as Maryland. Nearby stations in the top 25:

#2 - Union Station (4,278,930)

#8 - Baltimore (932,827)

#11 - Wilmington, DE (664,429)

#16 - BWI Rail Station (617,349)

Interestingly enough, if you increase the geographical area to include nearby parts of Pennsylvania, you'd pick up the #3, #20, and #22 rail stations (Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Lancaster respectively). For reasons I can not fathom, Pittsburgh gets fewer passengers than New Carrollton.

Overall, as a fan of train travel, I think a healthy passenger rail system would be a great thing for this country to develop (and I believe we're taking steps in that direction) so increased ridership is great news. Perhaps someday Amtrak will even make money outside of the Northeast Corridor!

Anyway, there's a ton of interesting info available from the Amtrak Information and Facts website. Basically you can look up total ridership statistics from any Amtrak station in the country and marvel at the fact that more people use the Aberdeen Amtrak station in FY09 than use Amtrak at all in Kansas, Utah, or West Virginia. Or learn that less than 5,600 people used the single Amtrak station in Idaho.

In case you're a big nerd like me, here's the raw data on Maryland total ridership:

	Aberdeen	Baltimore	BWI	Cumberland	New Carrollton	Rockville
FY03	40,658	855,675	541,438	6,831	229,101	1,961
FY04	43,755	918,624	590,610	6,919	216,579	2,654
FY05	48,047	980,122	578,554	7,839	218,184	2,554
FY06	37,414	910,523	561,505	9,100	206,830	2,984
FY07	38,702	977,379	587,845	9,182	204,008	2,905
FY08	45,052	1,020,304	644,640	11,257	203,449	3,178
FY09	44,495	923,827	617,349	11,484	179,344	3,345
Increase, FY03 to FY08	10.81%	19.24%	19.06%	64.79%	-11.20%	62.06%
Increase, FY03 to FY09	9.44%	7.96%	14.02%	68.12%	-21.72%	70.58%
	MD Total	DC
FY03	1,675,664	3,570,920
FY04	1,779,141	3,744,710
FY05	1,835,300	3,734,287
FY06	1,728,356	3,859,117
FY07	1,820,021	4,108,569
FY08	1,927,880	4,489,955
FY09	1,779,844	4,278,930
Increase, FY03 to FY08	15.05%	25.74%
Increase, FY03 to FY09	6.22%	19.83%

Good Ideas for Cycling Laws

The Greater Greater Washington blog is a great resource for people interested in increasing the availability and safety of alternate forms of transportation. Today they have a really good post on 12 Ways Our Region Could Reform Bicycling Laws. If you're even a casual cyclist in Maryland, you should read this article. I know that since I've been reading that blog I've learned that not only are the roads less safe for cyclists than I thought, but that generally cyclists don't have much of a legal leg to stand on in Maryland if they do get injured (or even killed!) by a car.

Baltimore 2009 Homicides - Everyone CALM DOWN

So the opinion in this town seems to be that Baltimore had 238 homicides in 2009 compared to an official 234 in 2008. Nationally homicides decreased in 2009. DC was way down this year. Quick, everyone panic!!

Bulls&%*.

In 2009 we had 14 prior year homicides. That means that 224 people died of injuries sustained in violent incidents in the city of Baltimore in 2009. 4 of those 14 prior year assaults occurred in 2008. Baltimore logged around 140 fewer non-fatal shootings in 2009 than 2008. As much as critics and "The Wire" fans would hate to admit, the homicide rate is lower and this city is safer than it has been in a generation.

The Baltimore Sun ran a very good series of graphics on what homicides and shootings looked like in 2009. The Sun shows that in 2009 there were around 450 non-fatal shooting in the city. While you might be like "DAMN!", if you look at the graphic you'd realize that only 2 years ago there were 652 non-fatal shootings. That's an incredible drop over a period of only 2 years. This whole "fight against bad guys with guys" that Bealefield is always on about seems to be making a difference. Frankly, given the level of non-fatal shootings, I'm shocked we managed to make it up to 238 for the year.

Actually, that's where homicides due to prior year assaults comes in. As I stated in the intro, Baltimore racked up 14 CY2009 homicides from prior year assaults. That's a lot. Per my research of the Murder Ink archives, we had 5 prior year homicides in '07 and 6 in '08. 14 is a big deal and it skews the real measure of how deadly the city was last year. In 2007, when the city record an official 282 homicides, 5 were a result of prior year result, which is about 1.8% of homicides. In 2009, we have 238 official homicides and 14 prior year assaults, which is 5.9% of homicides.

What this calls out for, no, cries out for, is someone to track homicides based on the date of the assault! Thankfully, I am willing to do this. I've carefully researched Anna Ditkoff's Murder Ink and the BaltimoreCrime blog posts. I've spent time auditing my numbers. Lots of time. My girlfriend has been frustrated by the time I've spent on this. But I've got your answer.

Discounting prior-year assaults, there were 279 murders in 2007, 232 murders in 2008, and 224 murders in 2009 as of the first week of January, 2010.

"But," you might say, "I don't understand! You said there were 282 murders in 2007 with 5 as prior-year assaults, so why is your total 279?" The answer is that I'm keeping a master spreadsheet. So if someone died in 2009 due to an attack in 2007, I go back and add the murder to the date in 2007 when the victim was attacked.

This master spreadsheet allows me to track a number that I call "Trailing Twelve Months Homicides". This statistic does not appear to be tracked anywhere else, but I think it matters. Restarting the homicide count every January doesn't show you how you're really doing. If you start counting every January, by March you're comparing 33 murders to 30 and coming up with a 10% increase in homicides when really it was just a couple bad weekends. There aren't a lot of homicides, really, so the data is really noisy and needs to be considered over at least a 12-month time period. So I think that Trailing Twelve Month Murders really makes sense.

So, without further ado, here's the plot of Trailing Twelve Month Murders from January 1st 2008 to approximately the present:

(Click on the chart above if you want to a better view of it, Blogger doesn't do a real good job with graphics sometimes)

Anyway, look at that graph for a minute. It shows that two short years ago the Baltimore murder rate was around 275 for the past 12 months. Today it's sitting much closer to 225. Back in mid-2008 we dipped below 215 per 12-month period before jumping back up to around 230. Most of '09 held steady around 230 (the 30-day moving average never got close to 250 for all of 2009). During the fourth quarter of 2009 the murder rate started slowly sliding downward. By the end of the year Baltimore was doing better than we had since 2008.

Why didn't you know this already? Because around Thanksgiving the ME's office started owning up to all the people that died this year who should be classified as homicides but were actually assaulted in a previous year. Ok, maybe it wasn't the ME's office. I actually have no idea who actually "owns up" to those statistics, but the point is that it hit us hard in December. Between Thanksgiving and the end of the year we added 8 prior-year assaults to the '09 homicide tally. So right as everyone started paying attention to the annual total, it jumped for an external reason. Prior-year homicides took December from a total of 19 homicides (about average for 2009) to 25 (a pretty bad month for 2008-09).

So the moral of this story is that Baltimore is on the right track. We're holding steady against last year (the best year for homicides in two decades) and even if we hold steady on new attacks, we're likely to drop the total. Non-fatal shootings are basically the feeder statistic for prior-year assault homicides and those have been declining, so I'd expect fewer of those next year.

Anyway, I may well dig up some more statistics about murders, but let me end this post with a prediction: I predict that 2010 will have no more than 215 homicides. When you add in the prior-year assaults, I'll take 220 as an upper bound for the official homicide tally in 2010.

Summary graphs for the year:

Finally, for the big nerds out there, here's the summary of homicides resulting from prior year assaults:

2007 - 5 (1991, 1997, 2x 1999, 2005)
2008 - 6 (1985, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2006, 2007)
2009 - 14 (1988, 1994, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 4x 2008)

Also, here's a link to my static XML murder charts.