Whether or not we think about it, there is a motive behind every one of the thousands of decisions that we make every day. It is only natural then, that there is a motive behind my reasoning for why I chose to conduct my research on metro systems and the variation of their operation hours. To be quite honest, identifying my motives may be one of the most difficult things for me to do/explain. Starting off, I find that cities are one of the most basic, and important, units of international economic and diplomatic activity (think of New York City, London, Tokyo, Cairo, Washington DC). These centers of activity really flourish when they are able to move people from place to place in an efficient and timely manner. Thus, if someone is taking public transit in the form of the city’s metro, they need to know a few basic things about the system itself, like when the system opens and when it closes. Additionally, on the part of the city, if the system is open longer, it can allow for more activity from the people within its territory. This could prove vital if agreements are time–sensitive, so it comes as a surprise when Washington DC, an important international city, shortens the amount of time its metro system will run on a daily basis. In a counter–intuitive measure, the city voluntarily closed itself off from economic and diplomatic activity (even when accounting for the official closure of a business day, many important relationships are formed throughout the day). This really gets to why I want to understand why different cities have different operation hours in their metro systems–because some of their choices seem just so counter–intuitive.

This motivation has really informed my choice to try and get more at the interpretivist realm of methodologies, even though I am starting off with a neo–positivist statistical analysis to gain a launching pad for the rest of my project. Understanding why choices were made with proper context is really the driving force behind case studies and other small analysis strategies, so it makes sense that the bulk of my analysis would come from that methodological choice.

In all of this, I think that there is one normative assumption that lurks within my project, and that is the assumption that metro systems are inherently a good mode of transit. There is also a lighter assumption within that; being that people will choose to take public transit over other forms of transportation, like automobiles. Other than that, I think that there aren’t really any normative assumptions.