I mentioned in a previous post that our team at the recent Hack/Reduce hackathon had some fun with a data set which consisted of Bixi station states at minute level temporal resolution. In addition to pulling out and plotting the flux at each station on an hourly basis, we also plotted the system state (number of bikes at each station) at each time-step we had. This totalled to 24,217 individual plots. Each plot was generated using an R script which took in the system state at each time-step, and output a png.

Team member Kamal Marhubi also did some nice post-processing to overlay the information on a map. The results are a little mesmerising. Things don’t get fun until about 40s into the video, as the first part mostly just shows the stations coming online for the first part of the season.

And for the non-Montrealers out there, here’s an image of a Bixi bike; our durable, data generating little hero.