Five- M in u t e A n a lyst
Bicycle
counters
Bicycle counter in Rosslyn, Va.,
along the Arlington Loop.
This sign is one of several bike
counters installed by Arlington
to monitor bicycle traffic.
By Harrison
Schramm, CAP
70
|
As longtime readers and friends know, I like bicycles almost as much as I like analysis, and I frequently think about both on a long ride. I cycle for
fitness, fun and as transportation – I have been a bicycle commuter for almost 15 years now. For these
reasons, I was overjoyed to discover that the city of
Arlington, Va., has installed pedestrian / bicycle counters along the ‘Arlington Loop’ [1] and, even better,
the data is freely available on the Internet [2]. The
good folks at Bike Arlington have already done some
very nice analyses of the data on their website, and
it is really cool that they are using trail usage data to
determine how to invest in future trails. The Arlington
data set is particularly nice because it includes daily
weather information in the same portal.
As with most analytic tasks, the hard part is not the
actual analysis itself per se, but rather the import and
cleaning of data. I used MS Excel 2013 to pull the data
from the Web via XML, and with minimal cleaning, the
a n a ly t i c s - m a g a z i n e . o r g
w w w. i n f o r m s . o r g