Block #2: 3rd Avenue & 60th Street—Low Upper East Side
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In our last post we covered the Garment District. Today we’re looking at 3rd Avenue between 60th and 61st Street, which for many New Yorkers, is the gateway between their personal lives and their day jobs.
Update [2/11/15]: One of our reader from Streetsblog pointed out that this is exactly the spot where Bronx high school student Renee Thompson, 16, was run over and killed by a turning truck driver last July shortly after 7PM on a Wednesday. Placemeter foot traffic data shows that this is right in the evening peak hour.
This Block is close to three major subway lines and bus stops for commuters shuttling between residential high-rises (the block is 76% residential) and office and shopping areas to the west. We’re also located right on the border between work and play in terms of land use, as beautifully shown by Darkhorse Analytics.
Diving into our sensor data, we see a crystal clear separation of weekday and weekend patterns.
The weekday curve features a symmetric bimodal distribution [fancy] suggesting that the same population commuting outbound in the morning is returning home to this neighborhood after work. Peak hour is 9AM on weekdays, a tad later than what we saw for our previous Block, 2,289 people per hour on average. That’s the total number of inhabitants in the quaint village of Dunkelsteinerwald in Lower Austria. Evening peak is at 2,155 people per hour at 6PM, same as the number of people called “Steve Thornton” in the US. Yes.
Midday density is the same across the whole week, suggesting that tourists and other non-commuters make use of local stores and restaurant — like the iconic Bloomingdale’s flagship, spanning an entire block itself immediately to the south of 60th Street. People coming home from late parties on the weekends are pretty visible as well, with higher average counts at 1 and 2 AM than weekdays. Whoop, whoop.
While this is a typical pattern for much of New York, here it is very pronounced.
We’ve compiled almost a month of data to get these averages, from January 7th to February 3rd 2015, and exactly like for our previous Block, it’s pretty easy to spot post-Snowmaggedon Tuesday.
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The BONY Team
Dataset (CSV)
Sources: Placemeter Data, Google Maps, PLUTO data.
