Visualizing the BART Labor Dispute

What is going on with BART?

In 2001, a strike was threatened, and BART employees received a 22 percent raise over the four year period from 2001 to 2005.

In 2009, BART employees negotiated a contract that gave no raise for the following four years. When an agreement wasn't reached by July 1st, 2013, the BART unions held a 5 day strike immobilizing many in the Bay Area. The strike only ended because the Governor instituted a 60 day cooling off period.

The major points of contention for the unions are pay raises, reduced employee contribution to pensions, medical benefits and safety.

We have collected many news articles for more context.

The salary data is a herculean Open Data effort from Mercury News and the Bay Area News Group.

Victor asks: How Much Do BART Employees Earn?

This visualization allows you explore each BART employee in terms of their costs of employment, such as base salary, overtime pay, health benefits, 401(k), and pension contributions.

Data Sources: salaries

Shirley puts things in perspective with cost of living

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Data Sources: cost of living salaries

Hyon asks: are the demands reasonable?

Concerned that BART employees are the highest compensated public employees in the Bay Area, Hyon looks into the financial factors around BART employment including historical raises and inflation rates:

BART is Bending Us Over Backwards
Data Sources: inflation fare raises revenue

Lewis debates the issue of fairness in transportation

Hyon asks: is a strike neccessary?


Following up on his earlier post Hyon takes a look at new proposal numbers and explores the issue of overtime pay.

Antony asks: How Much Do BART Employees Cost?

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Data Sources: salaries

Jon Slices the Salary data

Several ways of breaking down salaries for management and non-management BART employees
Data Sources: salaries

Lewis takes a look at Bart Ridership


Click thru to an interactive look at who rides where.
 Data Source: ridership

Jon Explores BART Ridership

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Data Source: ridership

Ian takes a look at highway traffic during the July strike

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Data Source: PeMS

Who made all this?

We are the Bay Area d3 User Group. d3.js is a powerful JavaScript library for building data visualizations and we get together to talk about it and build things with it.

We co-hosted 2 events with the VUDLab @ UC Berkeley to work on this project.
10/02/2013 - hack the BART strike
10/07/2013 - hack the BART strike round 2
The VUDLab is all about visualizing urban data and brought a lot of transportation expertise.

Special thanks to Halftone for helping design and build this website.
Special thanks to our videographer Matt who does a great job filming our meetups.

Data Sources

A lot of work went into collecting the data used in the above projects.
The project started when Ian asked EJ, Paul and Erik to help him find data about the BART after the strike in July.

After building up a repository and several visualization prototypes and speaking with Lewis and the VUDLab we decided to get the d3 meetup involved.

At the hackathons lots more data came in!