Project Background
With the first-year report for the city of St. Petersburg, I wanted to improve upon the processes, storytelling, and resulting format as an evolution from prior monthly reports. In addition, this project offered an opportunity to update annual reports provided to other client cities to date. As I launched the program in St. Petersburg with more public engagement and investment than my previous bike share systems, I had a goal to make the data interactive, enabling each person to view the data how they wished, creating an additional layer to the story to the one I would be presenting. With that, I utilized Google Data Studio for most of the data processing and the final presentation of the completed report.
What is shown below is an archived, static PDF, dropdown selection boxes are visible, however, to get an idea of the interactivity initially coded into the report.
Full Report
The Data Analysis Process
1. Ask | The Business Understanding
Prior to the Coast Bike Share program launching within the city of St. Petersburg, during the system implementation, the city’s transportation manager and I developed an overall outline of metrics to determine program success. Built on years of experience and reporting on bike share for other municipal clients, we refined the informational breakdown to work specifically for the city, including a follow-up on our pre-launch survey, returning new data a year after our launch.
2. Prepare | Data Collection
Similar to the first annual report in Tampa, data collection for customer behavior was reasonably straightforward, being provided by our vendor, Social Bicycles. However, with the inclusion of operations and marketing metrics, additional data collection tools had to be built at the start of the program, long before tackling this year-one report.
Operations Metric Tracking Tools
Within operations, many data points had to be tracked, including station visits, bike rebalancing, broken bikes, kiosk maintenance, monthly bike inspections, and bike repairs, to name a few. With this, I developed a data tool to input and track all of these metrics through Google Forms while making inventory, fieldwork, and forecasting more straightforward. Additional reports were automatically generated for each staff type within a linked Spreadsheet.
Marketing Metric Tracking Tools
For marketing, I developed a few data tools to track social media metrics, event engagement, and content marketing success monthly. This tool also had automated reporting enabling a new marketing staff person, myself, and corporate staff to understand the success of marketing programs at a glance.
3. Process | Cleaning Data
A rare luxury in data analysis, I built out data collection tools with this report in mind long before data started coming in, more than a year prior. Data coming from our bicycle vendor’s software was most difficult to modify, so I built all additional tools for operations, marketing, and surveys to mimic the structure and format of that software. This included date formats, bike share station names, and more. As cleaning data is often one of the more challenging phases of data analysis, this saved a lot of time and money, enabling data discoveries to be quickly understood and any changes to be put in place immediately.
4. Analysis | Data Understanding
With a bulk of the data manually gathered and cleaned from the time of collection, little had to be done beyond selecting dates within the existing data tracking tools for operations and marketing. However, for the one-year user survey data, a little manipulation was needed.
I was fortunate enough to work with a graduate student at the University of South Florida in conducting the survey, piggybacking on her more extensive mobility survey conducted as part of her thesis. This partnership enabled her to expand her sample size drastically while significantly reducing the time required on my side to write and analyze survey results. While she structured the portion of the survey related to bike share around our pre-launch survey, the tool she utilized required some backend manipulation on my part to be able to compare the final data with what we recorded a year previously.
Beyond these sections of data aggregation, user and behavior data was entirely processed using the Google Data Studio set of tools, significantly reducing the required time needed to script in Excel as it had been done in years past. This simpler processing afforded me more time to focus on the story being told and the design that would carry it.
5. Share | Report Assembly
The goal of the report was to tell a compelling story of the success of Coast St. Pete’s first year of operations as well as opportunities for improvements in the following year assisted by, not restricted to, the calculated metrics. With that, a recap of the mission, values, goals, and pre-launch processes kicked off the story. From there, the story outlines member breakdowns, business partnerships, trips, hubs, operations, marketing, survey results, and plans for the coming year. Each section includes compelling copy paired with supporting survey data and system metrics. The sections containing any ridership data afforded viewers the opportunity of date selection to focus on a smaller period of time. Pages speaking to hub information boil the data down even further, with the ability to select rider subscription type or origin and destination hubs. Hosting this report on CoastBikeShare.com/Data enables the general public, media, and other stakeholders to engage and make their own discoveries with the dataset as they please.
6. Act | Putting Data to Use
With year-one data assembled for the St. Petersburg Bike Share Program, a number of actions were put in place in efforts to better service the community and further expand the program. Goals established for 2018 aimed to focus on virtual hub introduction and station reallocation as a means to reach more users without significant capital investment. Experimentation with virtual hubs will introduce more freedom and flexibility for users. I also aimed to work on connecting and expanding our network into South St. Pete, to make bike share more equitable and accessible.
Programs developed for year two of operations included
- Coast’s Bikes for Everyone Program will address barriers to bike share use among low-income communities.
- Coast’s Brand Ambassador Program will enrich the Tampa Bay bike share experience by connecting residents and visitors with knowledgeable and enthusiastic cycling advocates.
- Coast’s Corporate Wellness Program will work with local companies, apartment buildings, colleges, universities, and community organizations, offering subsidized bike share memberships to employees, students, and tenants.
- Continued Community Outreach building on the foundation of year one marketing efforts integrating Coast Bike Share into daily life within the City of St. Petersburg.
Open Data
More Coast Open Data can be found on the Wayback Machine here:
http://coastbikeshare.com/data (Sept. 2018)
