In my previous article, I took a deep dive into the origins of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), expanded on its original goals, and investigated route expansion in the forthcoming years. I wanted to set the stage for BART ridership analysis, which is the focus of this article.
As any data scientist knows, it is good practice to understand the data before delving into a research question. Accordingly, I began by dissecting ridership data from 1998 to Aug 2023 on the weekdays vs weekends, most popular stations pre and post-pandemic, and post-pandemic ridership recovery across counties. My goal with this exploration is to isolate patterns, trends, outliers, and unexpected results to get a sense of the stories hidden in the data. This exercise helps to formulate a suitable research question based on the data at hand.