Background

Bay Area Bike Share commenced it’s pilot phase of operation in the San Francisco bayarea in August 2013 with plans to expand. It is the first bike sharing scheme in California.As it is meant for short trips, the bikes should be returned to a dock in thirty minutes orless or an additional fee would be incurred according to the website. There are two typesof memberships: customer and subscriber. A subscriber is an annual membership while acustomer is defined as someone using either the twenty-four hour or three day passes.Currently(Sept 2014), it costs nine dollars for twenty-four hours, twenty-two dollars forthree days, and eight-eight dollars for the year. Overtime fees are four dollars for an extrathirty minutes and seven dollars for each thirty minutes after that. Data on the first sixmonths of operations were released as part of a data challenge. The data included threefiles for trip history, weather information, and dock availability. The merged data was usedfor the following analysis.


Introduction

The aim of this book is to show how to apply data analysis principles to a practical usecase scenario using Python as the data analysis language. We’ll go on this journey bylooking at the the data workflow from munging to grouping data to visualizing and alsoinclude some time-series analysis as well. The format includes asking questions of thedata and showing the programming steps needed to answer the question. By the end ofreading this book, you will be able to apply these techniques to your own data.