Street safety is an obvious concern. No matter what we do, where we live, or how we get around, everyone cares about the safety of the streets where they live. But it wasn’t until my recent participation in Participatory Budgeting that I realized how crucial street safety is in local government.

So I decided to dive into the data around street safety. I wanted to find out more about things like where did crashes take place? Or how do crashes involving bicycles and pedestrians compare? And whether or not our street are getting safer? What I’ve written below are the results.[1]

Why we should care

The number one category of the number of ideas submitted in Participatory Budgeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts was Streets, Sidewalks & Transit. It is overwhelmingly more popular than other local concerns. This could be due to how residents view Participatory Budgeting and what things they might think are best to tackle within that budget, but it is revealing in that it expresses an area of concern for residents that is pretty approachable and solvable without requiring massive capital investment. Something all government officials should enjoy.

Another reason why we should care about street safety is because of the goals Cambridge has set out for itself. Particularly, its Vision Zero goal, the goal to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries. The city has laid out a plan for this vision but there is still a long way to go before achieving it.

Finally, we should care about street safety because city populations continue to grow and show no signs of slowing down. In addition, there are more and more types of vehicles appearing on our streets, including electric bikes, scooters, skateboards, and even autonomous cars. If we don’t figure out better ways to improve our roads now, it’s going to only get increasingly challenging to do so in the future.

What it looks like today

Now that we understand how important it is to improve our streets, we need to get a better sense of what the current level of street safety is today. In my opinion, one of the best ways to understand city street data is through visualization. Nothing drives a point home the way looking at the data on a map does. That’s why I put together this map of all the crash data in the city of Cambridge from 2010 to 2017.

Taking a look at the map, we can get a better sense of where crashes are taking place in the city.

You’ll notice a few things that clearly stick out on the map when looking at it. The first is that the major road arteries of the city (Mass Ave, Broadway, and Cambridge St) have the majority of crashes. It is pretty obvious why, because they also have the most traffic, but the thing that stands out is not what’s included but what’s not included — Memorial Drive.

Except for a few spots near major intersections or shopping areas, there are very few crashes that take place on Memorial Drive. Especially as compared to Mass Ave, which is almost entirely red (higher density of crashes) through the whole map.

This raises a few different questions. The first is that maybe crash reporting for Memorial Drive is inaccurate due to crashes being reported on nearby streets rather than on Memorial Drive? The could be due to drivers who are involved in crashes on Memorial Drive wanting to get off of it, in the interest of their own safety, before reporting it. Though if this were true, then we would likely see a high amount of crashes right next to Memorial Drive, which we don’t see in the data.

Another, more interesting question is whether the road composition has anything to do with the frequency of crashes? For example, Memorial Drive is a four-lane road (two lanes each way) that has few traffic lights, crosswalks, and intersections. Compare that to Mass Ave, which is a two-lane road (one lane each way, for the most part) and has a ton of traffic lights, crosswalks, and intersections.

Can the much lower frequency of crashes on Memorial Drive be explained by this difference? I’m not entirely sure. I would guess the amount of traffic traveled on each road every day is probably roughly similar, it’s even possible there is more traffic on Memorial Drive than on Mass Ave because of how slow and crowded it can get.

So it would seem that perhaps the amount of stopping and going, combined with having to watch out for bikes and pedestrians, makes it a much more crash-prone road to drive. This is an important point to remember as we look at the locations of crashes involving bikes and pedestrians and think about potential solutions to reducing their frequency.

Looking at bike related crashes, we can see that they almost exclusively are concentrated in 4 areas: Mass Ave (both north and south of Harvard Sq, and including Harvard Sq), Broadway, Hampshire St, and Cambridge St.

This makes sense since they are the major roads for bikers to travel on. But again, it also shows the infrequency of crashes on major roads that have separated bike lanes from the road, like Memorial Drive and the Fresh Pond area.

The most interesting part of this data is the Inman Square area. This area has a high concentration of crashes involving bikers and appears to make up a good amount of all crashes in this area. This is definitely an area that has come under a lot of scrutiny from residents in the past but has yet to be addressed.

If we look at pedestrian related crashes, it is clear that the heavy pedestrian areas (Central Sq, Harvard Sq, and Porter Sq) have the most occurrences of crashes. What stood out to me in the pedestrian data was the concentration of crashes near the Fresh Pond Mall. I had previously been unaware that that area was hazardous to pedestrians but by looking at the data it appears to be one of the more crash-prone areas in Cambridge for pedestrians.

It’s also interesting to note the differences between locations of bike and pedestrian related crashes. Bike related crashes are much more spread out along streets, whereas pedestrian ones are very concentrated near major intersections. This might suggest the frequency of bike crashes with parked cars, from opening of doors for example.

Another thing I was curious about when trying to get a better understanding of the current state of crashes in Cambridge was when they were happening, so I looked at both the time of day and day of week. Predictably, it shows that rush hour traffic has the highest concentration of crashes, with the majority of crashes happening on weekdays and during the morning or evening commutes.

Where it’s heading

Naturally, after looking at data like this the question of whether or not things are getting better arises. In order to answer that question, we need to look at the frequency of crashes over time.

Below is a look at the number of crashes by month from 2010 to 2017. The highlighted section where there is a major spike in crashes is for February of 2015. This was when the Cambridge area was hit by a number of large snow storms, which incidentally even broke the snowfall total records. Despite the likely lower amount of traffic in the streets during these months, the people who did brave the weather ended up getting into a high amount of crashes.

Besides the overconfidence of Boston area drivers in the snow, the graph above seems to show a general steady trend of crashes over time. To get a better sense of the trend of crashes over time, I plotted a linear regression model against the total amount of crashes over the years.

As you can see from the graph, it pretty much shows an even trend of crashes, with it actually slightly trending up. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing since it doesn’t account for things like severity of crashes and crashes as a percentage of total traffic (maybe the total amounts of people and cars on the road are increasing even faster?), it does at least indicate that it’s an area with room for improvement.

And just to give you more of an idea about how bicycle and pedestrian related crashes are trending, I’ve included those graphs below as well.

Again, don’t think that these graphs show a terrible trend for pedestrians and things getting better for bikers (but they might!), instead treat them as indications of where things may be going but also consider that this is just the trend of frequency of crashes, not necessarily the severity or proportion.

Another way we might look at the data is seeing how the frequency of crashes by objects involved look over the years. This chart is produced below.

Again, it shows a pretty even trend over time for all crash types. I would guess that most of the discrepancy in the numbers over the years is in reporting differences rather than any policy changes but further exploration into this data would be needed in order to determine the effects.

What we can do about it

Whenever I write a post like this that indicates there may be things we need to improve or fix, I don’t like ending it without thinking about potential solutions. The good news for this particular issue is that there are actually a lot of pretty straightforward ways to improve road safety. In fact, the city of Cambridge has already begun some of them, it would just be better if they went about it a bit quicker. But I guess that’s government for you.

Anyway, I think there are four main ways to approach the issue of street safety in Cambridge. The first is to fix the known problems. If you’ve lived in Cambridge for a bit and haven’t been exposed to the atrocity that is the Inman Square intersection then lucky you! However, for the rest of us, we know how terrible it is. But so does everyone who has ever been through it: government officials, residents, and visitors. It’s been talked about for years but still is yet to be fixed or to break any ground on a new solution. Now’s the time to do it, if this data is any indication, fixing the Inman Square intersection could have a noticeable impact on crash frequency in Cambridge.

The next approach is to build more infrastructure. Again, the city has already begun on this work by starting to build out the network of protected bike lanes as laid out in its Bicycle Network Vision. Many of the proposed protected bike lanes are in the exact areas that are needed most, Mass Ave and Cambridge St. If the infrequency of bicycle related crashes on Memorial Drive is any indication, it is that separating auto traffic from bicycle traffic can have a large impact in reducing the number of crashes.[2]

And while we’re talking and analyzing data, the third approach is to use the data! While the data I’ve explored in this post is not perfect by any means, it definitely helps show generally where the problem areas are. There’s really no excuse not to use the data. If you know an intersection has a high concentration of pedestrian crashes than change the intersection! Add more signs, slow traffic down, install or remove traffic lights, add raised crosswalks, etc. There are a lot of ways to try and fix the issue, but ignoring and thinking it will get better it is not one of them.

Finally, let’s explore some new and different ideas. Beyond just fixing the obvious problems with the obvious solutions, I think we should start thinking about new solutions.

I recently read Charles Montgomery’s Happy City which outlines a few interesting ideas that I think Cambridge could experiment with to increase street safety in the city.

There are a number of different ideas laid out in the book, like days without automobiles, building more and better parks, and changing zoning laws, but the one I found most interesting and straightforward to implement was the idea of converting some sections of roadway into pedestrian areas. A great example of this, as pointed out in the book, is New York City’s experiment of closing off parts of Broadway to traffic.

As you might expect, there was a lot of initial push back from the public. But in the end, its been a resounding success. Not only did it actually reduce traffic in the area but it also had a sort of revitalizing effect on the immediate area by increasing pedestrian activity and creating new vibrant areas that benefits both businesses and residents alike.

So with that in mind, I’ve actually started my own petition to get the City of Cambridge to experiment with a similar idea.[3] My idea is to block off a small part of Harvard Square to automobile traffic. This is actually pretty straightforward to do and would likely decrease traffic in the area by encouraging traffic to take faster alternative routes like Broadway or Memorial Drive.

Further, I think it would be a boon to businesses in the area because it would encourage more businesses to use the sidewalks and streets, perhaps setting up more sidewalk seating areas and installing more food trucks or pop-up shops. I think there are a lot of creative ways to enhance the space once more of it is freed up from automobiles.

Whether or not you like this particular idea, I think you can agree that street safety is an important topic in city life and something we, as a city, should be striving to improve.

I hope this post has been informative, interesting, and gets you thinking about ways you can help increase street safety in Cambridge, or whatever city you live in.

[Update: Thanks to an insight provided by a reader, it turns out that the lack of crashes on Memorial Drive may be due to it being a state road, rather than a city road. Which means that only accidents at intersections with city roads would be reported.]

Further Explorations

There is always more to do and learn about. So in that light, a few of the things I thought about while working on this project that I would like to explore further but didn’t include for constraint reasons are included below.

The first is to figure out the denominator, i.e. a better comparison of locations by looking at crash frequency and the amount of traffic a particular location sees each day. As indicated in the post, just because the total number of something is high, doesn’t necessarily indicate a major issue. In this particular dataset, having a high number of crashes in a location as compared to another, may just indicate that there is more traffic in that location, rather than it being an area of concern. What would be more useful would be to look at how locations compare safety wise after factoring in the amount of traffic that flows through it each day.

Unfortunately, this is quite a difficult problem to figure out because it is hard to know how many cars, trucks, buses, people, bikes, scooters, etc. pass through a particular location day in and day out. There is some progress here, like the Bike Counter in Kendall Square, but there still is a lot of data that needs to be captured in order to report on this accurately. Though with advances in machine learning, it could happen faster than anticipated.

The other further exploration would be to look at predictability. Given all this data about the location, objects involved, and time and date, is it possible to predict when and where crashes may happen in the city? Now that there are some really sophisticated machine learning algorithms, it would be interesting to test this out on the dataset. The caveat is that the dataset isn’t huge. But perhaps the way to do it is to use datasets from cities all over the country or world? Might be hard to predict though given different rules, cultures, and driving abilities. Still interesting though!

If you have any interest in solving either of the issues above, please let me know!

Slide Show

I also put together a slide show with all of the data and graphs talked about in the post for easier sharing and for those who’d rather look at pictures.

All of the data used is available from Cambridge’s Open Data portal found here.

For replication, checking my methods, or your own interest, all the code and data I used for generating these findings can be found here.

Enjoy this analysis? It’s part of a series of data analyses I am doing on the city I live in, Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can find the rest of them here: https://medium.com/a-look-at-cambridge.

[1] I took a look at data from the city I live in, Cambridge, Massachusetts, using the city’s police crash data that’s available from the city’s open data portal.

Something you should take into consideration while reading this post and looking at the data is that it is likely there are reporting issues in the data itself. I tried my best to clean it and account for any potential issues, but anything that requires manual reporting in potentially very stressful situations is likely to have inaccuracies and bias in the reporting.

One example of the poor reporting is a number of locations for crashes were reported at City Hall. While there is an intersection near City Hall that could have a number of crashes, the amount reported (by far the most total for a pair of coordinates) seems much too high for this area. I would guess that the reason City Hall has such an overwhelming amount of reported crashes is that it it is used as the default location when nothing else is reported. This is why you may see a large amount of crashes on the map right where City Hall is.

[2] It is also possible that it has nothing to do with the separation of automobiles and bikes. Though I would like that there is a good amount of bicycle traffic on Memorial Drive bike paths, it is possible that this is much smaller than the bicycle traffic on Mass Ave.

[3] If you like this idea and live in Cambridge, be sure to also support it in this year’s Participatory Budgeting. You can do that here.

A look at Street Safety in Cambridge, MA was originally published in A Look at Cambridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This past year I participated, pun intended, in the Cambridge Participatory Budgeting process as a budget delegate. I’ve written about that experience here. As I said in that post, I think Participatory Budgeting is a really interesting idea and I hope it receives more attention from city governments.

One of the inevitable results of something like Participatory Budgeting is that the average resident only ever sees a small fraction of all the ideas that were submitted. Having actually gone through a number of those ideas manually as a budget delegate, this is probably a good thing since many overlap each other and some are not entirely serious.

The downside of this is that it’s hard to gauge what it is that Cambridge residents want to solve in general. As a resident, you only see the ideas that fit into the city’s PB guidelines and even then only a select few of those.

I think Participatory Budgeting ideas might provide us with a lot of insight into what it is our neighbors are thinking about and wanting to solve. So with that in mind, I recently took a list of every idea that’s ever been submitted in a Cambridge Participatory Budgeting cycle to find out more about what ideas my neighbors have.

What types of ideas are most popular?

The Cambridge Participatory Budget separates ideas submitted by the community into categories. Over the years, these categories have slightly changed but can be broadly placed into the following categories:

• Streets, Sidewalks & Transit
• Environment, Health & Safety
• Parks, Recreation & Education
• Culture & Community
• Youth Education & Technology

So I looked at how many ideas over the years were submitted in each of these categories. The most popular category for ideas was Streets, Sidewalks & Transit. Probably not all that surprising since all of us use and are affected by this category in our lives daily.

One thing to note about these findings is that technology ideas weren’t broken out into their own category until the most recent PB Cycle (June — December 2017) and the Youth category didn’t start until PB Cycle 3 (June — December 2016).

Next, I thought it would be interesting to look at the popularity of these categories in each cycle.

Interest in PB over time

Breaking out these idea categories by year reveals that Streets, Sidewalks & Transit has always been popular but really gained popularity in the most recent PB Cycle. It also shows that Environment, Health & Safety ideas peaked in the 2015 cycle but has lost popularity in each cycle since.

Specific Topics

The last thing I was curious about was within each category what kinds of topics were most popular. This could give us a better idea of what the residents of Cambridge are concerned about or want to improve.

By using Google’s Natural Language API and cleaning up a bit of the results, I was able to find out how often a particular topic was mentioned in a submitted idea across all PB cycles. The below table is a result of this analysis.

There are a couple interesting insights from this data. If you ignore the top result, Cambridge, bike lanes are the most popular topic of interest. Also near the top are parks, sidewalks, libraries, and intersections.

Outside of bike lanes, most of these popular topics are just a reflection of common city life and would most likely be the most popular idea topics had PB been going on for 50 years. Bike lanes presents an interesting topic since they are a relatively recent addition to most cities in the US.

I also wanted to look at how these topics trended over the years. Were some topics popular in one year but not the next? Are the same topics always popular, year after year? Maybe by looking at the trends, we can get a better sense for how residents are feeling about the progress of things each year.

Here’s a look at the popularity trends of a few topics (wi-fi, bike lanes, benches, parking, and housing) over the years:

Bike lanes seem to be becoming much more popular of a topic over time but the rest seem to slowly declining in interest. This is particularly interesting in respect to parking since a lot of the complaints about bike lanes in the public have been due to parking. This either means it is overblown or the residents submitting ideas for Participatory Budgeting are of different opinion than those making their voices heard in the media.

This decline in interest could also mean that the city is doing a good job at addressing these particular issues, that residents are shifting their preferences to other things, or that residents have figured out which topics are best for PB and which ones aren’t. Keep in mind, however, that the sample size here is pretty small and can be heavily influenced by one motivated resident[1].

Closing Thoughts

As an advocate of Participatory Budgeting as a unique form of city governance, I had a lot of interest in seeing what my fellow Cambridge residents were interested in. Overall, it was intriguing to see the different trends of idea topics over time.

Participatory Budgeting is still a pretty new program in Cambridge so it is to be seen how successful it will be and how residents respond to it over time. The one major caveat with Participatory Budgeting is that it might not reflect the city’s overall preferences because only a select number participate in it.

However, it can still be a unique look at the city and its residents over time. What are people concerned about? Are things getting better? Is the city addressing the issues residents want? I hope this exploration has answered some of these questions or sparked new ones.

All of the data used is available from Cambridge’s Open Data portal found here.

For replication, checking my methods, or your own interest, all the code and data I used for generating these findings can be found here.

Enjoy this analysis? It’s part of a series of data analyses I am doing on the city I live in, Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can find the rest of them here: https://medium.com/a-look-at-cambridge.

[1] PB has a bit of a submission problem. Because they don’t require any sign up, verifications, or limits, one person could submit any amount of ideas they want, under any name. Therefore, sometimes one person could submit a lot of ideas, which isn’t necessarily a reflection of Cambridge as a whole. This is actually reflected in the data by the fact that one person, Martha Older, submitted 69 ideas herself, which accounts to about 4% of all ideas total. Love your enthusiasm Martha.

A look at Participatory Budgeting in Cambridge, MA was originally published in A Look at Cambridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bike share programs have popped up in cities across the world at a rapid pace. They are often touted as having many benefits including reducing pollution and congestion and improving public health. Despite varying success across cities, there’s seems little doubt that their popularity isn’t on the rise. This is evident in the rise of even more bike sharing models like dockless bike sharing.

Another growing trend in cities across the world is the use of data in governance. Just as businesses and sports teams have jumped on the data train, governments are beginning to as well. In the near future, all cities will govern by using data intelligently to better serve their residents.

In the interest of exploring these two trends, I wanted to look at how bike sharing was being used in the city I live in, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Most of the existing analyses done on the Hubway bike sharing program either look at the program as a whole or focus on our bigger sister city to the south, Boston. So I thought it would be interesting to just look at how Hubway was being used in Cambridge[1].

Without further ado, let’s dive into what I found.

Commuting with Hubway in Cambridge

The first interesting, though perhaps not that surprising, finding was how central MIT is to the Hubway program in Cambridge. Out of the top ten most popular trips in Cambridge, only trips between Linear Park and Davis Square did not involve a station at MIT.

This is perhaps not surprising given that MIT is near Boston, a more popular city, shown by the fact that the most popular trips are between Beacon St in Boston and the MIT Mass Ave station. However, it does reveal how central MIT is to Cambridge. Perhaps more surprising is that no Harvard stations appeared in the list of the most popular trips taken.

This leads to the question of what is Hubway mostly being used for in Cambridge? Are Hubway rides typically made by tourists? Students? Professionals?

So I looked at when trips were being made and found that there were more trips taken on a typical weekday than there were on a weekend day.

This was a bit surprising to me. I thought that Hubway might have more of a casual, take a nice Sunday ride, kind of usage but in fact it appears to be the opposite.

I then looked at what time of day most rides were taking place and found what you would expect if Hubway was being used as a way to get to work. Looking at trips taken during the week, the most popular time of day to take a trip was between 4pm and 8pm, with over 30% of all rides, and between 5am and 10am, with over 25% of all rides. So more than half of all rides during the week occur during the typical work rush hours. This is actually even understating its usage for commuting to work since the science and engineering crowd[2] aren’t always up and at them first thing in the morning, which would make the 18% of rides between 10am and 1pm to also fall into this category.

Hubway seems to be being used as an alternative means of public transportation for people getting to and from work.

It also appears that a lot of Cambridge rides are short. 80% of trips happen under 20 minutes. This isn’t that surprising given that Cambridge is not all that big of city to begin with. But it does indicate that most of the commuting done on Hubway probably does not replace other means of transportation (like driving, buses, or the T) and instead fits as an alternative to walking long distances or taking short bus or T trips. This would counter the argument that it reduces pollution that much if it is only replacing trips that otherwise would have little impact on pollution. This requires further investigation.

Who’s Hubwaying in Cambridge?

Another thing that I found interesting while looking into the Cambridge Hubway data was the demographics of the typical Cambridge Hubway rider. I was surprised to find how much more popular Hubway is with those aged 25–34 than with those 16–24. Thanks, millennials.

Based on this information and the information above, it’s pretty obvious that in Cambridge, Hubway is mostly being used as a mode of transportation for the young professional. Kendall Square is home to many companies’ offices so it makes sense that a lot of people would be commuting to that area during the workday. It’s also possible that graduate students make up some of these numbers since they tend to live off campus but given that there are only about 7,000 graduate students at MIT, they probably don’t make up that much.

The other surprising piece of information found about age of riders was that the 45–64 year old age range holds its own against the younger groups. This most likely reflects Cambridge’s bike culture but is impressive nonetheless!

One question that I have of in regards to this data is whether or not the ridership by age will always tend to be young because that’s the range when you are less likely to have a family, a car, and live in the suburbs? Or is this a generational change and our generation will continue to use options like bike sharing as a means of transportation even as we get older? I suspect it is the former but only time will tell.

Finally, another interesting finding on the demographics of Hubway riders in Cambridge was the gender differences. Males made up over 60% of all rides in Cambridge and possibly more since there was a decently large number of unknowns or others reported (this is self reported according to Hubway).

It’s possible the difference in ridership amongst genders is due to clothing though it could be for other reasons as well. This is one area that should be further explored.

It’s always about the weather in New England

One final interesting piece of data that I came across in my exploration was the impact of weather. Being a non-native of New England this one is particularly not surprising. Despite what you may here from die-hard New Englanders, the weather here is in one word, terrible. It’s also apparently terrible for Hubway too.

The below graph is all of Cambridge Hubway trips per day over time. As you can see, there is a lot of variability. Even if you ignore the significant drop-offs for the winter (a particularly brutal time to be riding a bike in Cambridge), you’ll notice that in the summer months there are still a number of drop-offs. I explored this data further and found that they almost always correlated with poor weather. Sometimes that had to do with unusually cold weather and sometimes because of rain. Of the two, rain had the larger impact and largely explains the biggest drop-offs found in the graph below.

Weather is known to have a big impact on bike sharing programs. Kaggle, the data-science competition website, has even hosted a competition for predicting ridership based on the weather. But it is still interesting to actually see the impact in the data and how significant particularly bad weather days can have. This also leads one to consider how cities could mitigate weather’s effects on bike sharing by investing in infrastructure.

Closing thoughts

It was pretty interesting going through the data and looking at how bike sharing is used in the city I live in. It’s not only revealing about how Hubway is used by Cambridge residents but also how Cambridge residents go about their daily lives in general.

There is obviously a lot more you can do with this data. As a resident of Cambridge, I hope that the city looks at data like this to make better informed decisions about how to serve its residents. For example, if the city was interested in increasing bike sharing amongst its residents, it should consider improving the biking infrastructure around the city.

This could be done in a number of different ways. They could increase the amount of people across age ranges using bike sharing by improving the safety of biking in the city with more protected bike lanes.

They could also add new infrastructure to improve the biking experience in bad weather. One idea would be to install bike lane shelters above the most popular bike routes across the city. They could even fit these with solar panels to have a dual purpose and reduce overall cost in the long term.

Bike sharing is just one city program that can use data to better improve the lives of city residents. I hope this exploration into how it is used in Cambridge is informative and inspires new ideas for how city services can be improved.

Further Exploration

Unfortunately, I didn’t explore everything that I thought of but here is a list of things that I think could be further explored in relation to this post.

• Look at how different variables, like weather, make bike sharing trips predictable. The future of cities and data will be proactive rather than reactive. With this in mind, how predictable is bike sharing?
• In 2015, Cambridge Hubway trips dropped off, why?
• What policies, infrastructure, etc can a city implement to encourage more use of bike sharing programs?
• Look at how some of these stats have changed over time, identifying trends
• Dec ’16 data is missing, would be good to have it to see if there is any new discoveries
• Why women are so outnumbered? Is it because of clothing? Something else?
• Keep it going for 2018 data
• Create a real-time version of this analysis with Hubway’s real-time data.
• Create interactive maps detailing all the above information, I’ve kind of started on this but unfortunately Medium doesn’t support embedding Mapbox maps.

Data

One of the benefits of having public bike sharing programs is that their data is made available to the public. You can find all of the data I used for this analysis on Hubway’s website.

Also, in the interest of replication and exploring the data yourself, you can find all of the code and data that I used in this post here. Please let me know if I made any mistakes or am missing something, I welcome the feedback.

Enjoy this analysis? It’s part of a series of data analyses I am doing on the city I live in, Cambridge, Massachusetts. You can find the rest of them here: https://medium.com/a-look-at-cambridge.

[1] I define Cambridge Hubway usage as any Hubway trip that either started or ended in Cambridge.

[2] Based on my own experience as an engineer ;)

A look at Hubway in Cambridge, MA was originally published in A Look at Cambridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.