Comparing Bicycle Ridership to Weather Data

Using public data from the City of Seattle and Dark Sky API to visualize biking trends

Last week, I started analyzing some data tracking bicycle ridership from the City of Seattle. As a biker myself, I was curious to know how much the weather impacts the number of bicyclists deciding to ride for fun or for commuting back and forth to work each day. In my previous post, I showed that the number of bicyclists is higher during the summer months, which is a pretty good indicator in itself, but I wanted to dive into this with more data and compare the ridership data to weather data directly. The results are pretty intuitive, but confirmation with real data is always nice!

Weather Data from Dark Sky API

Finding easy-to-use weather data can be pretty tricky. Although there are some governmental sources available, the Dark Sky API is much nicer. The free accounts allow you to call the API up to 1000 times per day. (I had to spread my calls out over a few days, but it wasn’t that hard to do!) Unfortunately, it looks like they’re no longer accepting new developer accounts since they’ve been bought out by Apple, but if you have an account and an API key already, the service will be available until 2021. I guess I’ll have to start looking for a different way to get weather data soon though!

Using the API, I downloaded data for the 7 year time period that I used from the Fremont Bridge bicycle counter data. The daily…