SITE OVERVIEW
This site provides an interactive simulation of
Bike Share Toronto traffic for each day from January to October 2020 (with more dates coming soon). It was created using ridership data sets available through the
Toronto Open Data Portal combined with cycling routes generated by
Openrouteservice. The map above displays three layers of information:
Bike Activity - The little green bikes zipping around the map, each representing an individual trip. (You can hover your cursor over any bike icon to reveal its associated Bike Share trip ID.)
Station Activity - Each Bike Share station is represented by a black circle which changes colour based on recent activity. Every bike leaving a station adds some red and every bike arriving adds some green, which means that stations with both happening at around the same time turn yellow - and the more activity there is, the brighter the colours become. For every minute of map time that passes, the colours are set to fade by a small amount, so a station with no recent activity will eventually turn back to black.
Active Trips Graph - The graph in the bottom right corner tracks the number of the active trips each minute, providing a quick summary of how traffic volume evolves throughout the day.
DECISIONS, ASSUMPTIONS, & LIMITATIONS
-The following types of trips were excluded from the visualization data: trips under a minute, trips over 24 hours, and trips where a destination was undefined.
-All trips are assumed to be direct and use a constant speed from start to finish. (For bikes moving at a snail's pace, it’s practically guaranteed that they travelled more complex routes and/or had some mid-trip stops happen.)
-Trips that start and end at the same station are shown as a motionless bike while active.
-This site uses station location data collected in 2021, but it's known that Bike Share Toronto has moved some stations over the course of its existence. As such, it's likely that some stations are not represented in their proper historical locations.
TECH/TOOLS USED
Pandas and
GeoPy for all the data work.
Openrouteservice for the cycling routes.
Mongo for the bike/station activity database.
Leaflet for the interactive map.
Vega Lite for the active trips graph.
Font Awesome for their bicycle icon.
DISCLAIMER: This site is not affiliated with Bike Share Toronto.
This site is a work-in-progress and the visualization data will likely change as improvements and optimizations are made.
Last updated on 2021-05-10.