Team Members: Brandon Levy, Tina Quach, Mikayla Murphy, Lisa Woo
Link to presentation:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yDLBzar1jGO5Fz6SXmD9QTVfEKjNu1borJMKfu3pJFY/edit#slide=id.p
Summary statement: The data show that Hubway bike B00490 (“Queen Bee Bike”) was used more times than any other bike from Hubway’s launch in 2011 through the end of the 2013 regular season, and bike B00552 (“Night Owl Bike”) was used between the hours of 11 pm and 2 am more often than any other bike. We want to tell the stories of these two bikes because each Hubway bike has its own story, formed by a variety of Hubway bike users, and highlighting interesting, data-based facts about certain bikes via high-school-esque superlatives and creative bike designs encourages potential users to contribute to these stories by riding Hubway bikes.
For our sketch, we used data provided by Hubway that included every trip taken by a Hubway bike between July 28, 2011, and July 24, 2013. We first calculated the total number of uses for each bike and designated the bike with the most uses as “Queen Bee Bike” due to its popularity. To represent the story of Queen Bee Bike, we constructed a chart in which the horizontal positions of Queen Bee Bike and the average bike represent the total number of uses for each. We chose this type of chart because we wanted to make a visualization that looked like a race between the two bikes, with Queen Bee Bike way ahead of the average bike.
We also determined the number of uses for each bike between 11 pm and 2 am and named the bike with the most uses in this time span “Night Owl Bike.” To tell the story of Night Owl Bike, we constructed a graphic in which the amount of moon visible represents the number of trips taken in that late-night time span by Night Owl Bike compared to the average bike. We designed the chart in this way because we thought it was a fun and easily understood way to represent this piece of data, especially since the average number of late-night uses was roughly half the number of late-night uses for Night Owl Bike, so we could easily represent the former with a half-moon and the latter with a full moon.
Ultimately, we envision the end product of our data visualization to be a yearbook for the “Hubway Class of 2013” in which specific bikes are highlighted and given superlatives that relate to some interesting factoid about them, and in which a creative chart is used to compare each highlighted bike to the average bike on the relevant metric. We envision having several additional bikes featured in this “yearbook” in addition to the ones used in this sketch. Some of our ideas include Lothario Bike (highest proportion of female users), Bombshell Bike (highest proportion of male users), Adventure Bike (most unique Hubway stations visited), Marathon Bike (longest single trip over the course of one day), and Hardworking Bike (longest streak of consecutive days used).
Hubway data source: http://hubwaydatachallenge.org/