Routed in Place

Welcome to Routed in Place, a collection of data stories about cities and transportation. 

I’m Ethan, and I started this blog in 2025 as my personal sandbox for exploring open data. In my career as a data analyst, I am often struck by the sheer volume and variety of publicly available datasets that exist but are relatively unknown or underutilized. My goal is to use these data to highlight interesting trends and patterns shaping our cities and transportation systems. My stories tend to be locally focused in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the places I call home.

I anticipate that many story ideas will emerge from open-ended explorations of potentially interesting datasets, but others may take the form of responses to recent news articles or planning documents. I hope to offer a critical perspective about how data can be ignored or misused to shape public opinion or justify decisions. At the same time, I also want to explore the assumptions and gaps that shape the creation of data themselves.

Some posts may include a bit of technical how-to for data analyses, and any code I write will be linked so that interested readers can replicate or adapt my methods. However, my primary aim is not to demonstrate data techniques, but to tell stories.

Thanks for reading! Below is a teaser of some of the topics I’m considering for future posts. For any suggestions or questions, feel free to reach out to me via email (mail@routedinplace.info).

• Recent transit ridership trends relative to service levels
• Trends and geographic patterns in the permitting, financing, and construction of housing
• Bikeshare as a substitution for vs a complement to public transit
• Comparison of neighborhoods with a large variety of housing types and price points vs neighborhoods with a more homogenous housing stock
• Fairness of transportation spending across travel modes and geographies 
• Neighborhoods with highest shares of work-from-home
• Performance benchmarking across state departments of transportation
• Changes in employment and small business openings by industry
• Ways to measure affordability and living costs