Bjorn Vermeersch depicts bike share stations as planets. Bjorn Vermeersch/Bay Area Bike Share
Looking at the Excel files that contain six months’ worth of data from the Bay Area Bike Share program is mind-numbing. But when all that information is laid out in the form of a solar system instead of endless rows, it’s easy to understand and analyze.
Bike share programs allow people who buy memberships to use bikes parked at stations scattered around a city. They’re meant to be used for short rides, to cut down on long walks and the use of cars. The Bay Area program, which operates about 700 bikes at 70 stations, opened in August 2013. More than 500 cities around the world offer bike sharing programs, and each needs good data to keep things running smoothly.
They may want to look at Bjorn Vermeersch’s solar system data visualization. It was a winning entry in the Bay Area Bike Share Open Data Challenge, a contest to present all that information in a way that most humans will actually understand, and be interested in. The 31-year-old Belgian native, who lives in Santa Cruz and does post-doctoral research in thermal science, has no formal background in this kind of work. Graphic design is a hobby of his, and when he heard about the challenge, he downloaded the data and began looking for ways to make it comprehensible.
Vermeersch started off trying to plot the data onto something resembling a subway network. It didn’t work for bike share, he says, because bikes don’t have to follow specific paths. Then, reading Scott Christianson’s 100 Diagrams that Changed the World, he saw Copernicus’ famous diagram of the planets orbiting around the sun and felt inspired.
The solar system is a good analogy, Vermeersch says, because it’s familiar to most people and it allows for lots of variables. He made planet a station, its size determined by how many trips start or end there. Its axial tilt indicates how traffic fluctuates between months. The farther it is from the sun, the longer a trip that starts or ends there lasts. The day/night shading shows the balance between trips that start there (light) and those that end there (dark).
The result is a representation of the system that provides an easy to understand overview of the network. You can easily pick out the popular stations (like the San Francisco and Palo Alto Caltrain stations) and see how far people tend to ride (about 17 minutes during the week, 40 minutes on weekends). But if you look more closely, there’s plenty of detail to chew on. You can pick out the stations where people are more likely to start a trip than end it (the Redwood City Medical Center), and where bikes are likely to run out. You can see which stations are popular all year, and which are more used in summer than winter.
To break down the difference between rides at different times, Vermeersch created a set of constellation-like diagrams. Each “star” is connected by a line to the station with which is shares the most trips. The thicker the line, the more rides. During commute times, many trips go to or from the Caltrain station. On weekends, trips are longer cluster around the station near the tourist-heavy Fisherman’s Wharf:
The San Francisco bike share network is shown as a constellation. Bjorn Vermeersch/Bay Area Bike Share
What sets Vermeersch’s entry apart is the way he made a messy pile of data easy to understand. More importantly, it’s engaging. Everyone’s familiar with the standard solar system diagram, which helps pull them in. The fact that it’s not immediately clear what you’re looking at, that not everything is spelled out, pushes you to look closely at the data and think about how the system is used. You can see his entire entry here.
For his efforts, Vermeersch won—what else—a few gift certificates for Bay Area Bike Share memberships.
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