The Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles provided the Boston Globe with data in July 2018 showing what kind of private passenger vehicles are registered in each town in Massachusetts (including make, model number, and number of each type).
The Globe used the data for a story that ran in September 2018. Todd Wallack wrangled the data. Billy Baker wrote the story. And Patrick Garvin creates the graphics and digital presentation.
The RMarkdown file in this repository generates an HTML file with all the key statistics and facts used in the story, as well as a few maps.
The R script also generates the key stats, as well as several output files to help sort through the data, including:
Top make and model in each city and town
- top_car.csv
- top_make.csv
Top 10 makes and in each city and town
- top_10_make.csv
- top_ten_cars.csv
Ranking of all makes and models in every town:
- rank_make.csv
- rank_models.csv
The script also saves some intermediate files that you can probably safely ignore: car_model.csv make_popular.csv
Note: The repo also includes a code sheet that the RMV provided with abreviations for most manufacturers. Unfortunately, it appears the RMV used a different set of codes for some older cars in the database One possible way to improve the analysis would be to obtain the list of older codes and convert them into the current ones so all the cars would be listed under a single name (rather than two different ones).