So Twitter Smarty Henry Fung (@calwatch) let me have some data from LA Metro’s 2016 survey. I’m going to have my students learn a little text mining on it; there aren’t a huge amount of comments, but I find it can be good to learn to mine text on smaller files, just to avoid over-plotting and shorten the run times. Some of these are interesting:

Sad word cloud.

If work requires people to use a car, people use the car. Sigh. I sit through a lot of lectures from very smart people who tell me that nonwork travel is important, and it is, but paying your rent and eating are also important, and if people get cars because of work, then they have invested a lot of money in that mode of travel and it’s just hard to get them on to transit. As long we are talking about MOAR SUPPLY, more work destinations served by transit would probably help us out here.

“Long” and “expensive” do not reassure us much, either, and neither does the frequency with which parking gets mentioned. I often say to my students that Metro does not have an easy job. Even this little bit of fiddling backs that up pretty well.