Those aren’t bridges — they’re graphs of how many people enter and exit each Metro station for each quarter of an hour. Reddit user BioNrd created the image using Metro’s October 2014 data, which the agency recently made available.

Click on the image to see the full version.

The darker dots are entries, the gray ones exits. You can see the stations with the greatest traffic are the ones with the dark peak in the afternoon (stations generally downtown). What else do you notice?

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.