Following up on yesterday's post about bicycle data from a counter on the Rock Road in Dublin, I took a quick look at three years of data and used Excel to compare data for 2013, 2014, and 2015. A simple line plot was too messy, so I used a four-point moving average to smoothen the data for easier visualization. Here's what three years worth of data looks like:
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| Click image to enlarge. |
For the most part, there is not much difference between the three years - it seems that the numbers of bicycles passing the counter on the Rock Road are consistent and not showing growth over the three years. Without using trendlines (pointless in cyclical data), it appears that 2015 (blue line) and 2014 (red line) are close together throughout the year. 2013 (green line) seems to vary a bit more - especially during March where the figures are consistently below 2014 and 2015.
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| Click image to enlarge. Image source: Met Éireann. |
I checked the Monthly Summaries and Bulletins page for data for March 2013 at Met Éireann who reported that it was the "COLDEST MARCH ALMOST EVERYWHERE". Dublin Airport reported a mean temperature of 3.1°C, its coldest March since the weather station there opened in 1942. If you look closely at the rainfall map for March 2013 you'll see a particularly dark patch (indicating rainfall 200% to 250% of normal) for the South Dublin and the Dún Laoghaire area. Perhaps us South Dubliners are averse to a bit of cold and wet weather? It's no surprise to find a weather impact on cycling data on a daily or even weekly basis, but a prolonged period of a month where day-after-day there was wet and cold weather clearly has a longer term effect. If you look closely again at the chart above you'll also see that the data for 2013 (green line) during April lags behind similar figures for 2014 and 2015. Perhaps a weariness with bad weather forced South Dubliners to jump into their Mercs or take the DART to work!
Notes:
- The data and rainfall map of Ireland from Met Éireann are taken from: http://www.met.ie/climate/monthly-weather-reports.asp, and are used without permission
- The open data from cycling counters is freely available at: https://data.dublinked.ie/dataset/dlr-cycle-counter-data
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