Erik Jensen

Personal

Falling in Love with Biking in NYC

If you've met me at some point since I moved to NYC, you might be a bit surprised to learn that I was not a huge fan of biking before moving here. As a kid growing up in the mostly car oriented suburbs (not in NYC), biking was a fun

How-To

Reporting Data 102: Auto-Emailing Reports with Python, MJML, and Gmail

Relying on humans with busy schedules to spend time each day sending recurring emails is going to lead to missed emails and errors. Automate them instead!

Travel

Fall in Pennsylvania

Even though I spent almost the entire summer and Fall in New York City, I ventured into Pennsylvania a couple times to catch up with friends outdoors and get a break from the city.

How-To

Reporting Data 101: Turning around Reports Quickly with RMarkdown and LaTeX

I happen to have a lot of knowledge working in R and LaTeX left over from the days when I thought I would be an academic, so when I needed to automate a weekly report, they fit the bill.

Travel

Exploring Finland via Train and Water

Back in the spring of 2019, I had the opportunity to visit my then fiancée (now wife) in Tampere, Finland. She was living there for a few months working, and I was glad to get the chance to take a week off from work and spend some time with her while exploring the two largest cities.

Personal

A Day in Quarantine Life

Other than the 10 days I spent locked in the bedroom with COVID-19 (0/10, would not recommend), life has settled into an uneventful routine. Here's what it looks like.

Code

Leaving Cmder for Alacritty: 2020 Edition

Since about 2017, I've been using Cmder almost daily as my console emulator of choice. There were a few key reasons why I gravitated towards it, and why it has stuck around for so long, but few issues have now led me elsewhere. Would I still recommend Cmder?After so

Personal

Working from Home on Minimal Notice

On Sunday, March 15th the governor required all nonessential state employees to work from home, including all of us at the MTA. While the IT department directed employees to use Teams and Webex for remote work, unfortunately the organization also had a fairly active Slack subscription as well...

Theory

Using Checkers to Estimate Free Coffee Rates with Cluster Sampling

After a new city program to promote reading, Taylor ended up in charge of measuring how many people actually brought in books to get their free coffee. While Taylor is not a statistician, they do have a leg up their sleeve.

How-To

How to Scrape WMATA's Real-Time Train and Bus Movement Data

Most large transit agencies have research groups whose full time job it is to analyze operational data, but they often face strict restrictions publishing data. With historic records of real-time data though, academics and nonprofits can perform their own creative analyses.

Transit

Behind the Scenes of Seattle's Transportation Infrastructure

A few weeks ago, I went to Seattle on an exchange program with between the Seattle Chapters of Young Professionals in Transportation (YPT). I was able to go on behind the scenes tour of transportation infrastructure throughout the city.

How-To

Using Parks and Transit in QGIS to Orient Local Readers

A little while back, there was a report from NYCDOT called Bus Forward. While I worked on some of the analysis in the report, one thing I noticed was that the analyst behind the maps included parks, despite them having little to do with bus speeds. Thanks to this report,

Transit

Why Street Patterns can Make or Break Buses

For a couple years in high school I took the DC Metro to the bus to get home. While I often exaggerate the numbers when talking about my commute, even today Citymapper says it would take at least an hour to get home. Because of bus bunching, on a route

How-To

Using pgRouting to Calculate Transit Catchment Areas

In order to show the effects of a grid vs loop and lollipop road network, I downloaded the GTFS files for Ride On bus here. These are simply txt files, with routes, stops, schedule information, and some other details. For this visualization, I also needed a routable network loaded into

Transport

Streetmix, A Street Section Builder for Activists and Professionals Alike

Back in 2013, San Fransisco's Department of Public Works wanted to find ways to facilitate public feedback for the Second Street Improvement Project. Traditionally, planners have used paper cutouts and drawings to get feedback from the public, but this is time consuming, not very flexible, and makes it difficult to

Personal

Photos from the Chihuly Exhibit at the Bronx Botanical Gardens

A couple of weekends ago, my girlfriend and I went to the Bronx Botanical Gardens. At the time, there was a Chihuly special exhibit which we wanted to check out. The two of us got on the Subway and took a 4 train up to Bedford Park Blvd. Station. Most

How-To

Setting Up Scoop as a Windows Package Manager

MacOS has Homebrew. Linux has APT. Windows sort of has OneGet. I dual-boot Linux on my desktop, but unfortunately that doesn't seem too feasible on my Surface Book. Since there's a whole bunch of software that is difficult to keep up to date (think 7-Zip), I wanted to have something

Research

Access to Banking Services in Washington D.C.

As I spoke about a little bit in a previous post, inadequate access to savings tools is a classic example of a poverty trap. Without basic banking services, smoothing consumption levels and preparing for emergencies is far more difficult. Income levels differ drastically across Washington D.C., which should hopefully

Transport

A Rainy Earth Day in NYC

Last Saturday (April 22nd, 2017) was Earth Day, and the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) set up a whole bunch of events here all across the city. I took a Citi Bike to 45th Street and started walking down Broadway. DOT closed Broadway all the way from Times Square to

Personal

Say hi to Arwen!

Hi everyone, This isn't a technical post, life has been kind of hectic the last few weeks. I've also spent most of my personal free time playing the fantastic Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. So instead, here are some pictures of my girlfriend's and my new cat Arwen.

Video Games

Predicting Katowice 2017

Note: I wrote this post before the matches were played. Overall, I was pretty happy since I went three for four. I only had Team 8 at a 54% chance. Most surprising to me was that Nomia actually picked up a game on Misfits, even if they didn't win the

Economics

Development Economics (and the United States) Part I: Savings Theory

During my Master's degree, I took a course in Development Economics from Cynthia Kinnan* (which had nothing to do with transportation directly). Throughout the course, I noticed that many of the concepts in the course could easily be applied to the United States. A lot of the statistics and economic

QGIS

Mapping the IP Addresses in the GRIZZLY STEPPE Report

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the director of National Intelligence (DNI) issues a Joint Analysis Report (JAR) called GRIZZLY STEPPE. The analysis attributes the security compromises during the 2016 election to Russian actors who used Russian civilian and military infrastructure. While there is a good

Video Games

Scraping Heroes of the Storm Competitive Information with Scrapy

I have previously written about my Glicko ratings of competitive Heroes of the Storm (HotS) teams, and how I put that information into a SQLite database. Up to this point though, I have been entering all of this information manually. In order to do the kind of analyses that I

How-To

Setting Up SQLite on Windows 10

I recently wrote a post on rating teams in Heroes of the Storm and used a regular CSV to store all the data for my ratings. To be honest, that worked perfectly fine although I have been hoping to do some more advanced analysis, particularly looking into rating players. While