Animating a Busy Day for Capital Bikeshare
April 10th, 2012 [programming]
The new data for the first quarter of Capital Bikeshare open data has been posted; I picked the busiest day thus far, on Friday, March 23, 2012, and made a movie showing the bikes zipping through Washington, DC. That Friday saw 8,362 trips. Of those, 606 (7%) were to and from the same station; I did not include those trips in the movies. This 96-second animation samples CaBi trips for a 24-hour period every 30 seconds. Registered users are shown with dots that fade from blue to purple; casual users have dots that fade from green to yellow.
Afterwards, I experimented with a different format. Using the same data, the movie below shows the entire trip for that trip’s duration, with a small white dot moving across a colored line. As before, the path of the dot doesn’t represent the actual path taken by the rider; all we know is their beginning and ending points, and the check-in and check-out times.
You can see similar movies for older data (2010 and 2011) via these posts:
[...] through June 10. More photos below, as well as the video of the Capital Bikeshare visualization. You can learn more about that piece on MV’s blog. Photos of/from Zeitgeist [...]
How do you make this visualization?
I just wrote a post about this
I used “Processing” – see Creating Animation with Processing. So, I used CaBi’s open data to build arrays, then looped through the data to draw each frame.