New Yorkers are infamous of complaining about everything. Naturally that includes the subway, that it’s only consistent in making you late to work. But based on the actual data released by the MTA, are those claims actually founded or just another way to pass time?

This visualization project posed a common problem at its outset: the dreaded spaghetti plot. In trying to visualize on time performance of each individual train over time, a traditional line graph is hard to beat for a time series. But with a categorical variable (trains) with several different values, it would inevitably cause a line graph to be too noisy to actually convey anything of meaning. Thus my solution was a lasagna plot. Not only did it help display the categorical variable in a more digestible format, it also allowed color to tell part of the story as well.