Some months ago I discovered that there are a number of bike shares out there that make their data publicly available, and I’ve been meaning to download some of it and poke around. Well today I finally had some time. And though I’m not sure what I’ll be doing with this data set yet, I wanted to share a figure I made in my initial exploration.
The following figure shows the number of rides per day and the median ride distance for the Portland OR bike share (data from BikeTown: https://www.biketownpdx.com/system-data). I threw the code in a new github repo here so you can take a look if inerested, but I’m not going to go into detail yet (the code just downloads their system data files, concantenates the monthly files and does some minimal processing and plotting). In any case, the figure:
The neat (and maybe unsurprising) feature is the strong seasonality to bike share usage, both in terms of just the number of rides per day (high in summer, low in winter) and the median distance of each ride (longer rides in summer). There is an interesting spike in total rides around May 2018 — maybe excitement for springtime? or additional bikes added to the program? A plot of bike usage percent (total rides / available bikes) might be more illustrative.
So that’s that for now. Hopefully won’t be too long before I have time for some more in depth analysis.
Bikes!
Chris Havlin 