The Road to Campus
A survey-based data portrait exploring whether commute burden shapes civic engagement among UH undergraduates.
A Data & Society collaboration with Kaylee Gallardo investigating whether commute burden affects civic engagement among University of Houston undergraduates. We designed and distributed an original undergraduate survey, then cleaned and analyzed the responses from 41 students. I led the transportation side in Python and built two visual “data portraits” that tell the story: “The Road to Campus,” a branching road map where students fork by residence and transport mode (road length encodes average commute, width encodes number of riders), and “Constellations of Civic Life,” a star map plotting each student by commute time and civic-engagement index. The analysis found essentially no correlation between commute time and civic engagement (r = 0.08), suggesting a long commute does not, on its own, pull students away from civic life.
Highlights
- Designed and distributed an original undergraduate survey; cleaned and analyzed 41 responses in Python.
- Built “The Road to Campus,” a branching road-map portrait encoding commute time and ridership by transport mode.
- Built “Constellations of Civic Life,” mapping each student by commute time and civic-engagement index (PCA).
- Found no significant link between commute time and civic engagement (r = 0.08, p = 0.74).