I'm Still a Nerd

Long ago, when I was new to blogging, I commented that I was a huge nerd because I decided to plot my car mileage vs time. I never stopped being that nerd, now I just have a much larger sample size.


My car mileage is still fairly linear, but you can see that there has been a slight change in the slope over the last couple years. (You can also see that I got really bad about getting my car in for regularly scheduled oil changes in the late 2008, early 2009 timeframe, but let's not focus on that.)

Looking back at the data, I can see that between January 2005 and January 2008 I drove approximately 44,000 miles. Admittedly, I did drive a huge road-trip one Christmas (nearly 4,000 miles in less than two weeks), but that's still averaging just under 15,000 miles per year. Over the more recent 3-year period (January 2008 to January 2011), I drove only ~35,000 miles. The funny thing is, I've actually increased my commute distance by a couple miles per day since June 2008. How am I driving less?

I think the big change is that in June 2008 I moved close a train station that allowed me to occasionally take commuter rail to work instead of drive. Nowadays I can also take the light rail or bike to the train station. I have also, over the last few years, become a big fan of new urbanism, walkable neighborhoods, and public transit (I've always been a fan of biking places if possible). Also, more recently, I've moved in with my girlfriend and now make her drive me places sometimes because car pooling is more efficient or I'm planning to drink alcohol (or I'm feeling lazy and talk her into driving). Also, this last fall I had a problem with a bent wheel that I procrastinated on fixing because I didn't want to pay all the money since I knew I needed tires anyway.

All of this combined means that I drove around 11,300 miles in calendar year 2010. That's about 2,400 less than I drove the first 12 months I owned my car!

Finally, in what is definitely a miracle of Honda engineering, my car continues to get around 30-32 mpg on average. So by those numbers, I'm saving myself 75 gallons a year which was probably worth between $150 and $225!

Finally, in a particularly ironic turn of events, in my 2007 blog post on my driving I was pissed off to learn how much of my gasoline costs went to taxes. Now, in 2011, I've educated myself a lot more about transportation funding/policy and I've seen some income growth while inflation has been nearly non-existent. As a result, I'm now a huge fan of raising taxes on gasoline in Maryland (since the gasoline tax is not indexed to inflation and has not been increased since 1992), especially if its used to fund effective public transportation, bicycle transit improvements, or improve run-off control from existing highways.

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By the way, the latter part of the last decade was actually a period of time in which the US was becoming less car dependent. Some group called The Center for Clean Air Policy released a study that included a chart showing that from 1960 into the mid-90's GDP growth and growth in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tracked each other almost exactly. But around 1995, the two started to diverge, with GDP growth outpacing the growth in VMT. Very, very encouraging news! Good blog post with commentary from the New York Times.

Baltimore Murder Charts - Year End 2010 Edition

I haven't been the best at updating my blog recently, but one of the few original things I post regularly are charts covering Baltimore murders. My sources remain Murder Ink from the City Paper and the Baltimore Crime blog.

Murder trends for 2010 were not nearly as exciting as 2009. Murders declined again, but not by a large number. Most of 2010 looked like 2009, the main exception being that there were far fewer deaths classified as homicides due to prior year murders. As I've been doing, any homicides classified due to an act in a prior year are counted in that prior year (by going back and editing data). So using this methodology I get slightly different numbers than the official tally, but I think it's better for tracking trends.

In 2009 there were officially 238 murders in Baltimore, but 14 of them were due to acts of violence from prior years, so I count that as 224 murders. In 2010 there were officially 223 murders in Baltimore, but 4 of them were due to acts of violence in prior years (none of them from 2009 though, so no upward modification). So while the official numbers drop from 238 to 223 (a 6.3% decrease), my count drops from 224 to 219 (a 2.2% decrease).

Still, we've come a long way since 2007. The 2010 total is down 20% from 2007. The improvements are pretty obvious when you look at the homicides by month and the cumulative plot of homicides for the last four years.



In fact, 2007 was such a higher total than 2008-10, it's actually better to remove it to compare the more recent years.


So what do we have? Looks mostly like stability. Sure, from 2008 to 2010 there were about 14 fewer homicides in Baltimore, a total of a 6% decrease. Not terribly impressive, even if murders continue decreasing at this rate we'll have to wait until 2017 to see murders become something that happens only every other day. That's not a terribly cheerful prediction. Hopefully the continued focus on reducing illegal guns in the city will continue to lower shootings and homicide rate will drop faster.

It needs to. Baltimore's per capita murder rate remains one of the worst in the country. At 35 per 100,000 (my math based on 223 official murders and U.S. Census estimated population for 2009). However, if you are African-American in Baltimore the per-capita murder rate is unbelievable. According to Anna Ditkoff of Murder Ink, 90.6% of 2010's murder victims were African-American. Based on Baltimore's demographics, this indicates that African-Americans in Baltimore face a 50 per 100,000 per capita murder rate while residents of other races experience a 9 per 100,000 per capita murder rate. To put that in perspective, residents who are not African-American are safer in Baltimore than the average Albuquerque resident (source: Wikipedia article on crime in US cities).

Finally, my favorite chart that I create for tracking murder trends:


Vertical axis magnified:

Links to previous year's homicide summaries:
2009 Year End Summary
2008 Year End Summary

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%