All Capital Bikeshare Trips in June 2018

This is my first project to incorporate a spatial database via PostgreSQL/PostGIS. I downloaded Capital Bikeshare trip data for June 2018 and loaded it into PostGIS, where I created line geometries based on origin and destination coordinates. I then grouped the trips by their origin and destination, counting how often each one occurred. Finally, the data was loaded into QGIS. Overall, the CaBi system saw 392,338 trips in June 2018, 43,511 of which were unique.

I also thought it would be interesting to visualize the patterns of casual trips vs. member trips. To do this, I queried how many trips occurred each day by member type. Below, the results are visualized with Chart.JS. Interestingly, despite the high number of tourists visiting the District each summer, casual rides never surpassed member rides in June.

After noticing temporal patterns in popularity for member and casual trips, I wanted to see what spatial differences existed between them as well. As a result, I chose to visualize all trips taken on a particular day. June 12th seemed like a good choice as it had the most rides of that month. To visualize the trips, I selected all trips that took place on June 12th and then used the QGIS Time Manager plugin to animate the trips throughout the day. Post-processing was performed with GIMP.

In the GeoGIF below, we can observe a few interesting patterns. As a resident of Prince George's County, my attention was first drawn to its stations, which were only just introduced in 2018. Although the stops along the Route 1 corridor are not terribly close to other portions of the CaBi network, riders are showing *some* willingness to make long trips to and from (mostly from) this area. One can then imagine the possibilities if this corridor develops the CaBi density seen in other suburbs like Arlington or Silver Spring.