TIME-BASED EXPLORATION

OF BICYCLE TRIP DATA

ANLY500 Analytics I: Principles and Applications
Sarasij Ghosh
Srikanth Shankar
Atanu Banerjee
Subhasree Goswami
 Introduction

● Designed to provide bike sharing operators, a better understanding of some of the factors that affect the
usage as well as different patterns or trends seen in bike usage.

● “Ford GoBike is a regional public bicycle sharing system in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.

● August 2013- 2,500 bicycles in 260 stations across San Francisco, East Bay and San Jose.

● June 28, 2017-officially launched as Ford GoBike in a partnership with Ford Motor Company.
 Research Objective

In this analysis we are using R programming to analyze the open source data provided by FordGo
Bike in bay area. We are trying to categorize the analyses in few important sections like

● trips by calendar year – how it varies with time, increasing or decreasing?

● total number of trips by day of the week – weekday vs weekend?
● total trips by hour of the day – peak hours, is it consistent across the year?
● number of trips by hour across the year, usage by city.
● customers vs. subscribers usage – who dominate the usage?
 Research Methodology

● The data is obtained primarily from the FordGo bike site which consists of several json
files to pull the data.

● Kaggle : data has been previously pulled from the company website and stored in the
form of relational database tables and .csv files.

● The time frame in this analysis is over a two year period, 2014 – 2015.
Trips by Calendar date

● Total number of trips by calendar date over a two year period.

● Depicts how the usage varies throughout the year over a period of time.

General expectation/ Null hypothesis

● Trips made in summer might be more compared to winter.

● Booming - usage increasing over the years.
Trips by Calendar date
Trips by Calendar date

Usage throughout the year

● Smooth fit shows trips made in July is higher than January - weather dependent?

Usage over two year period

● Although the trips varies over the year but usage has increased over time - booming!

Interesting visualization

● A split in the data scatter plot - weekday vs weekend effect?

Trips by day of the week

● Digging on step deeper to understand the pattern

● Usage over a week - weekday vs weekend pattern

● Understanding customer base - customer vs subscribers pattern

Trips by day of the week
Trips by day of the week

● Fewer trips at weekends than at

weekdays - office commuters!

● Plot with different color coding

● How important is subscribing?

Trips by hour of the day

● Office commuters cause most

demand at 9am and 5pm
● Subscribers also find the same time
as the beneficial time to rent
● Around noon, a spike in the graph
shows that most of the travelers or
non-subscribers prefer that time.
No. of Trips by hour across the year

● More or less similar trend

throughout the year
● Can see total number going down
in 4th and 1st QTr. because of
weather
Customers vs Subscribers

● Subscribers mostly use during the

weekdays
● During weekend, usage is more or
less even
● SF gets extra clients over the
weekend whereas each of Palo Alto,
Redwood City has a balance
utilization
Summary and Conclusion

● This research will help business operators to improve their business models based
on customer behavior, demand etc.

● Bike rental is a booming industry in Bay Area

● Weather dependent

● SF very suitable for this business to grow