Data Is Plural

The National Transit Database. Every year, hundreds of U.S. transit systems — from the Pomona Valley Transportation Authority’s Claremont Dial-a-Ride to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s New York City Transit — submit detailed metrics to the congressionally-established National Transit Database. The NTD’s datasets cover a broad set of topics, including “agency funding sources, inventories of vehicles and maintenance facilities, safety event reports, measures of transit service provided and consumed, and data on transit employees.” The NTD also provides a glossary, data collection manuals, and the underlying forms. [h/t Michael A. Rice, a teacher at Ingraham High School in Seattle]

Landslides. The Cooperative Open Online Landslide Repository (COOLR) is a recently-launched NASA project that “seeks to cultivate an open platform where scientists and citizen scientists around the world can share landslide reports to guide awareness of landslide hazards for improving scientific modeling and emergency response.” The repository has been seeded with the agency’s Global Landslide Catalog, which it says is already “the largest openly available global database of rainfall-triggered mass movements known to date.” You can explore the COOLR data on an interactive map or download the data in several formats.

Regional Medicare usage. The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services publishes a series of “geographic variation” spreadsheets, which cover hundreds of metrics — such as kidney dialysis usage, the total cost of medical tests, and hospital readmission rates — related to Medicare beneficiaries’ healthcare in each state, county, and “hospital referral region.” [h/t Drew Ivan]

Anthony Bourdain’s travels. Christine Zhang has compiled a CSV of 400+ locations featured in Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, The Layover, and Parts Unknown shows. The spreadsheet-as-remembrance includes each location’s name, country, latitude/longitude, plus the relevant episode’s show, season, number, and title.

Cars at auction. Kansas City publishes a dataset of cars for sale at its monthly auction. As of yesterday, the dataset contained 482 cars. For each car, the variables include the make, model, year, VIN, reason for being auctioned — e.g., “abandoned,” “stolen,” “illegally parked” — and other details.