After over 15 months of working from home, I finally found a chance to visit my ‘real’ office in the Financial District this week!
Change of Commute Pattern
For those who moved during the WFH period, you might need to start thinking about how your new commute would change. As I have moved to the Peninsular (for those who don’t live in the area, peninsular=area between San Francisco and the Silicon Valley), I am switching to taking Caltrain to work.
After getting off the 4th & king Caltrain station, I need to find a way to complete the remaining 1.4mile commute to the Financial District. There are a few last-mile options: bikesharing, taking muni, using a scooter, or walking. Since I never use the bikeshare system in SF, I decided to give it a go this time! While planning the route, I was curious about where people used the system to get to. I decided to download the historic bike share data from Baywheel to see how people choose to bikeshare to from the 4th and King station.
Destination from the 4th&King
I started the exploration by looking into the February 2020 Baywheel data (the last normal month before the lockdown). I used the peak-of-the-peak day (2/26, Wensturday) and extracted all trips originated from the Caltrain station during the morning commute hours (7:30–9:30AM). If you are interested in how I cleaned these data, I saved my code here in my Github page. This beautiful map below is the heatmap of all destinations. I am not surprised to find out that over 70% of the trips ended near Financial District or SOMA. It is clear that the bikeshare system is helping commuters to fill the gaps between the Caltrain station and the Financial District. However, I also have to admit that facts that only 67 trips occured during these two hours periods.
Bonus Map
Since I already have the all-day data , I also ploted all the trips happening on February 26, 2020. Each line represents one trip by connecting it’s origin and destination. Here is what the result looks like:
It is a pure joy to look at this map, especially when I think about each link represents one actual biking trip made by someone!
For the next blog, maybe I can take a look at how these patterns change during COVID! Should be fun! Stay tuned!
