This application has two purposes. First, as a trip planning tool for New York Citibike users. Second, as a data visualization for weekday Citibike trips.
Trip Planner:
Helps a rider plan route by showing not only current status of bikes/docks but also a prediction for bikes/docks over the next 2 hours based on historical data. Full instructions below and on site itself.
Data Visualization:
There are two data visualizations.
A “flow” visualization which shows the movement of bikes throughout the day. Data is based on average movements for weekdays only with data collected every hour from 6/2/14 through 7/11/14. Full details below and on site.
A “static” visualization which filters stations based on certain attributes, described below. The basic idea was to find any stations that are generally empty, full, “just right”, or very volatile.
A note on the data:
Data is collected every hour on the hour from the Citibike API, taking a snapshot of the bikes/docks for that time for each station. This data is then used to generate the averages used for the predictions and the visualization.
This data is collected using a separate Rails app (Bike on jwink github) that has a rake task to query the Citibike API every hour. Much of the initial data manipulation takes place outside of this app. The other repo on github that has files pertaining to the project is bike_spike.
TRIP PLANNER INSTRUCTIONS
Welcome to Bike-Vis! Plan your Citibike trip…
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Color represents station saturation with darker having more bikes.
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Click on a station for current status
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Choose “Pick Up” or “Drop Off” within station popup (turning station green) for more detailed information including:
- Forecast of bikes/docks over next two hours based on historic data for the current day and time - The best alternative station to use (yellow color)
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Signup as a user or Login with Twitter/Facebook to save your favorite stations!
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Add/drop stations by clicking on them and using buttons in popup.
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Filter for just your favorites using Filter box in top right corner of map.
FLOW VISUALIZATION INSTRUCTIONS
Flow Visualization:
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Based on data collected every hour from June 2, 2014 through July 11, 2014
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Filtered for weekdays only
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NYC split into five sections, each section represented by a color. The darkness of color represents how saturated with bikes that section is as a whole
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Station radius represents saturation for that particular station
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White circle in middle represents bikes in use
STATIC VISUALIZATION INSTRUCTIONS
Static Visualization:
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Yellow: Stations where saturation is always less than 30%
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Gray: Stations where saturation is always greater than 50%.
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Green: Stations never too full or too empty, saturation always between 40% and 60%
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Orange: Volatile stations. The difference between max saturation and min saturation over the day is greater than 70%.
rake doc:app.