NYC Digital

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NYC has 262 Zip Codes. Find out which areas of NYC correspond to which Zip Codes below:

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Mayor Bloomberg often touts the fact that NYC has more college students than Boston has people.

Below is a map showing NYC’s 76 colleges and universities, created from NYC OpenData.

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Check out these NYC restaurant heatmaps created by dfkoz using the NYC OpenData “Restaurant Inspection Results” dataset:

In my last post, I used NYC OpenData’s Restaurant Inspection Results to generate a heatmap of restaurant density in New York City. While there are more heatmaps to come, I thought I’d tackle a slightly different question for today’s post: what’s the safest cuisine in New York City? Hint: it’s not this.

First, let’s get a few basics out of the way. There are about 24,000 restaurants in the city. Of these, the most popular cuisines are “American” (25.6%), Chinese (10.0%), “other” (5.4%), pizza (5.2%), and Italian (4.3%). The least common are Chilean (1), Polynesian (1), Czech (2), and Iranian (2). Bagel/pretzel joints represent only 0.76% of restaurants — too low in my opinion. Perhaps we can close down some of the 398 donut shops (1.66%) to make room.

The New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (can someone please explain what mental hygiene is?) performs an unannounced inspection of each restaurant at least once per year. Restaurants are then assigned a grade that must be prominently displayed on the restaurant’s storefront. If a restaurant has too many violations, the DOHMH can also close the restaurant until the violations are addressed. Like so:

Since starting inspections, the city has awarded 40,700 A, B, C, or P(ending) letter grades and cited nearly 500,000 health code violations. Citations include everything from the suspicious (“Duties of an officer of the Department interfered with or obstructed.”), to the disturbing (“Toxic chemical improperly labeled, stored or used so that contamination of food may occur”), to the amusing (“Personal cleanliness inadequate. Clean outer garment, effective hair restraint not worn”).

How do the citations break down by cuisine type? In the charts below, I’ll be using VPR (violations per restaurant) for each type of cuisine, and ignoring all cuisines with less than 35 restaurants.

None of these come as a huge surprise, though there were some interesting results in the full list: tex-mex (15.67 VPR) did much better than Mexican (18.64). Bagels/pretzels (19.48) had a disturbingly high VPR, while vegetarian food (16.19) lived up to its healthy reputation. Almighty pizza (17.07) was middling.

Granted, violations are very different from overall grades and — worse yet — outright closure by the DOHMH. Nevertheless, violations are strongly correlated with poor grades.

So, how about those grades anyway? Of the 40,700 grades awarded overall, 65% were A’s, 24% were B’s, 10% were C’s, and 1% were P’s (which is effectively a C, I believe.) In the data below, a 3 is equivalent to an A, while a 1 equals a C/P, so each cuisine is awarded the equivalent of a GPA. Here are the cuisines with the highest and lowest GPAs:

Note that Chinese/Japanese, Chinese, and Japanese are all different categories. So you can have Chinese OR Japanese food — but never try to get both at once. The offenders, by the way, really do stand out from the crowd. Here’s what the duration curve of grade scores looks like:

Next, here’s what the grade breakdown looks like for the top 20 most common cuisines. Green is an A, yellow a B, and red a C/P:

Finally, you can find the comprehensive list of VPR and GPA by cuisine below. But the overall lesson is clear here, folks: if you keep eating healthy foods like burgers, donuts, and ice cream, you’re gonna be ok.

nycopendata:

Check out these NYC restaurant heatmaps created by dfkoz using the NYC OpenData “Restaurant Inspection Results” dataset:

Two things I like are data and food. The two rarely mix, unless you do something stupid like create a heatmap of restaurant density in New York City. Which is exactly what I did. Without further ado, here it is:

Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan

Upper Manhattan

Downtown Manhattan

If you find this chart tasty, then try calling back for reservations over the next few days. The raw data set from NYC OpenData includes restaurant inspection grades and cuisine types, so consider this just the appetizer.

Lots of attributions here, since putting this together was like making Frankenstein. Restaurant addresses, of course, came from NYC OpenData’s Restaurant Inspection Results. Geocoding the raw addresses turned out to be harder than I expected, but it was nothing Excel/VBA (don’t judge) and Yahoo! PlaceFinder couldn’t solve. In order to generate the heatmaps, I used the Google Maps API and, most crucially, a JS heatmap library from Patrick Wied. Phew.

Create and submit data visualizations from now until Friday (December 16th) using the dataset below on Department of Sanitation Collection Tonnages in September 2011. You are welcome to use correlative data from other sources as well. We’ll post some of our favorites on the Tumblr throughout the week. We challenge you to dive beneath the surface and find relationships that might not be immediately apparent.

(Source: nycopendata)