Interview Highlights: Tracking Transportation in New York City During the Pandemic with Juan Francisco Saldarriaga

By: Hannah Lin (CC '23)

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Cover illustration by: Arooba Ahmed (CC '23)

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 Juan Francisco Saldarriaga, MS, MArch, is the Senior Data and Design Researcher at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at the Columbia University School of Journalism.

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The following is a heavily condensed version of the full interview. If you're interested, read more here.


You research at the intersection of so many different fields. Those are, and I’m quoting directly from your website, data, geographic information systems (GIS), visualization, journalism, architecture, urbanism, and the humanities. How did you get into this work? 

I first got into GIS (geographic information systems) and mapping in my urban planning masters. When I graduated from that, I started working in the Spatial Information Design Lab, which was a lab at the architecture school at the time. There, we were doing research on data visualization, working specifically with datasets around cities and transportation: urban data. ​

Part of what made the Spatial Information Design Lab special was that we often collaborated with people from 

other disciplines. That included the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, where I work now, because a lot of the ways in which we were trying to present information and data overlapped with the work that journalists do in telling stories. We also collaborated a lot with people in the humanities because a lot of the datasets we work with around cities, population, and migration are also humanities datasets. ​



Can you describe the research you’ve been doing related to the pandemic?

We’ve been doing two things. One is a more general Brown Institute initiative. In early March we decided to do a rapid call for proposals around COVID and journalism or research. We had more than 300 proposals combining journalism, storytelling, and data visualization around COVID. 

There was a very interesting proposal that wanted to study domestic violence during COVID. There was another very interesting one from a radio station in Alaska, where they wanted to just get equipment so that they could transmit their COVID-related information better to a broader audience—it was the only radio station that covered a big swath of land, and without that, the community didn’t have any information. 
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On a more personal level, I am currently doing a research project around transportation and COVID in New York City in partnership with David King, who is a researcher at Arizona State University. We are looking at how the choice of transportation mode for New Yorkers has shifted throughout the crisis. Initially, we wanted to test whether there had been a similar decrease in usage of all transportation modes, especially subway and Citi Bike. Our hypothesis was that people actually switched to Citi Bike for a little while before everything shut down, so we wanted to compare the decrease in both transportation modes. 

We’re still working on it, so we haven’t published it or written it, but what we found was that both transportation modes decreased simultaneously in a very parallel manner, in a similar magnitude of decrease. 

What’s been interesting has been the reopening. We have actually seen that the number of riders taking the subway has really not picked up that much, whereas the number of people riding Citi Bikes and moving around on bicycles—the city has bicycle counters on the bridges—has picked up. Right now, we’re in the middle of testing whether they have picked up to normal levels, or whether they’re still below normal levels. 
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We also still need to figure out what kinds of trips these are, because these could be trips of people going to work that have replaced subway trips, or these could be different kinds of trips: a person locked at home who decides to go for a ride after lunch, a person who decides to bike to the supermarket. 

Finally, the other thing we want to understand is the spatial distribution of these changes. There have been a few good analyses looking at the decrease in subway usage and how 

the decrease, even though it was enormous (more than 50%), has not been uniform across the city. Some neighborhoods have seen decreases around 90%, while others have seen decreases around 40%. That’s pretty much tied to demographics, especially income and people who are deemed essential who are, most of the time, in lower-income neighborhoods that are still relying on public transportation. ​



What projects are you looking into for the coming future?
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There are a few research projects that I have in the back of my head. There is one urban planning project looking at segregation in cities, especially in Colombia, the country where I’m from. Cities there are divided by income levels. There’s a map that actually says, “this neighborhood is middle income, this neighborhood is low income,” and depending on that designation on the map, you pay different rates for your utilities and different taxes for your property. It’s a sort of government-sanctioned economic segregation. I’ve been collecting Twitter data on how people talk about 

the segregation for around two or three years, and I want to do an analysis where I test how much this policy has influenced the way people talk about segregation.

There are other things we do at the Brown Institute. In this year’s cohort, a lot of grants have to do with COVID or with the protests around the killing of George Floyd. One of my main jobs is to accompany these grants and help them throughout the year. We have a grant that is looking back at the 1994 crime bill and the Central Park Five case and looking at how the media was talking about crime in that moment to understand the role it played in racializing crime. That’s one of our biggest grants, with a team from Columbia and Stanford, so a bicoastal grant, which we really like. 



What is your perspective on how the pandemic is shaping the future of journalism and data?

From what I understand, journalism is in a very important moment. Before the pandemic, it was in a difficult financial position. However, with the pandemic, with all the other things going on, the value of journalism is becoming more clear and people are starting to realize that supporting good journalism is important not only for themselves but also for a healthy democracy. I’m hoping that that really serves to maintain the good journalism that is happening and to encourage more of it. 

I think journalists are becoming very good at working with data and at questioning data. Data is an incredibly powerful resource, but it’s also something that needs to be questioned and well understood. You shouldn’t put all of your trust in a dataset. Journalists are becoming very good at doing that, so I am hopeful. I’m very happy to be in this area at this moment, because I think it’s very exciting.