Exploring Blue Bike Trips

Nov, 2019

I am an infrequent user of the Boston area's BlueBikes bike share, but I was interested in spatially visualizing where people use the service. Amazingly all of the trip data is open-source.

Use the map below to explore where people are traveling to from each station by hovering over or clicking on a station in the map. The size of the circle indicates the number of trips that originated there. Explore when people are traveling in the heatmap at the bottom of the page. Change the month and year in the dropdown menus to see data from other times.

What trends do you notice? Does the expansion of bike share stations into new neighborhoods always result in increased ridership? And when are stations being used the most? Some peak in usage during the week when people commute to work while others are more active during the weekend.

The text in the story map was last edited in the Fall of 2018, and the interactive trip explorer was last updated to incorporate data from May 2019. I will try to keep it as up-to-date as possible.

UPDATE: Motivate, which operates BlueBikes in Boston, also operates the bike share systems in other US cities. I'm working on maps of bike trips in other cities and will add them here as I progress: