There are 100 fixies per capita in Manhattan? So each person in Manhattan owns 100 fixed gear bicycles? No wonder rent is so expensive; I imagine storing 100 bicycles isn't cheap!!
It's not "unclear" it's "inaccurate." :p "Per capita" means something specific, not just "you know, whatever." Thanks for the response tho! I could take the article more seriously if the charts made sense; consider fixing them? :)
We're just looking at a sample of the data so the actual per capital figures aren't meaningful. Would have loved to have showed that, but instead we just normalized the data to 100.
100 doesn't represent a physical number. It's just an indication of the relative frequencies. If, for example, Manhattan had typically two fixies for sale per person (this is completely made up), then Brooklyn would have 1.25.
Yes, per capita literally does mean "per person", but the purpose it serves here is to allow meaningful comparison of more than just raw numbers. Manhattan might have 1,000,000 fixies, and Brooklyn might only have 100,000 fixies. This by itself doesn't really tell you much, since what if Manhattan had 1,000,000 people and Brooklyn only had 50,000 (again completely theoretical); then, the "per capita" fixie bike index would be twice as high in Brooklyn.
"Fixies per person" in a geographic region isn't a "raw number".
I don't get your point with the example, for those values I get "fixies per capita" of 1 in Manhattan, and 2 in Brooklyn. That clearly states that there are twice as many fixies per person in Brooklyn as there are in Manhattan.
If you also normalize based on Manhattan, you'd get 100 and 200 which say exactly the same thing but with more zeroes and no longer being "per capita".
Sorry if that was unclear. The original comment stated that using per capita in this manner would be "inaccurate", but you can't compare Manhattan and Brooklyn simply by comparing the total number. What I was trying to explain in response was that Priceonomics didn't have "fixies per person" data, only the total fixies for sale in a region (the "raw number"). Without using per capita, these results could easily be misconstrued.
not only that but surely 'per capita' is a terrible measure to use for normalizing a place like manhattan where the population during the day (aka the size of market for bike shops) is such a large multiple of the 'per capita' population (http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2012/01/8efea7...) .. surely a better normalization statistic would be sales of fixies / sales of all bikes
There are 100 fixies per capita in Manhattan? So each person in Manhattan owns 100 fixed gear bicycles? No wonder rent is so expensive; I imagine storing 100 bicycles isn't cheap!!