Healthy Ride Trip data Analysis

Intention

This project is to analyze the data available at the WPRDC and Healthy Ride to determine the patterns and trends of bike rentals within the Pittsburgh region since May 31st, 2015 to June 2017. 

Dataset

This exercise, was for the initial exploration of the Moving cities module 4, wherein I worked on the dataset healthy ride-rentals-2016-q1 from WPRDC which contains healthy ride bike data of Months from 2016 January, February, and March. I also used the station dataset to visualize the number of stations available and their capacity and locations. 

Trip data: https://data.wprdc.org/dataset/healthyride-trip-data

Station data: https://data.wprdc.org/dataset/healthyride-stations

Initial Analysis

There are 52 bike stations in Pittsburgh. The average number of racks are 17.4 racks with minimum = 2 and maximum = 35. 

During this period the most popular Healthy Ride Hubs during this period ere 21st & Penn Avenue originating from this station while healthy ride hub rides to the station. The least popular stations had less than 100 rides starting from these over the 3 month period; Boulevard of the Allies and Park View and Alder street + South Highland had very less rides beginning there respectively. These two hubs had the least rides through these 3 months. 

As I explored further it can be seen that the number of trips increases as we go further to the warmer months and there are very low rides during the colder months. It is interesting to see that even during the colder months there is a sudden rise in bike trips on 29th January 2016. 

It is interesting to see the that trips made on weekends is are high, which is obvious but there is an unusual, trend of a high bike trip on Thursday and they fall down on Friday. 

From the station location and capacity map, it can be seen that the stations are located majorly in the central business district, central Oakland, Shadyside and Southside flats and a few in East liberty. It is interesting to note that that are two big capacity bike stations in Shenely Park and Bigelow, which are both a to some extent away from Carnegie Mellon University, as well the University of Pittsburgh. Does this indicate that the bikes are used for leisure more than for a commute? 

Future Work

I would further like to explore whether the distribution of the bike stations and its capacity is even and does meet the demand and supply or it fails to do so. Also, I would like to explore which neighborhoods use healthy bike the most rather which neighborhoods are most healthy.