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Homework 3 — Blue Bikes

Skills Practiced: 1, 2

Introduction​

Bluebikes is a public bike share system in the Boston metropolitan area. In this assignment, you'll analyze trip data from the Bluebikes system to practice working with tables, filtering data, creating visualizations, and transforming columns.

For this assignment, you'll be working with a CSV file containing information about Bluebikes trips. The file "bluebikes-data.csv" contains the following columns:

  • duration: Length of the trip in seconds
  • start-station-name: Name of the station where the trip began
  • start-station-latitude: Latitude coordinate of the starting station
  • start-station-longitude: Longitude coordinate of the starting station
  • end-station-name: Name of the station where the trip ended
  • end-station-latitude: Latitude coordinate of the ending station
  • end-station-longitude: Longitude coordinate of the ending station

Problem 1​

Load the Bluebikes data from the CSV file into a table. Define a table called bike-table with the appropriate column names and types

Problem 2​

Many commuters use Bluebikes to travel between specific locations. Create a new table called porter-square-trips that contains only the trips that started at "Danehy Park" and ended at "Porter Square Station".

Problem 3​

Trip durations can vary widely. Design a function called duration-category that takes a row from the bike table and returns a string categorizing the trip duration as "short", "medium", or "long" based on the following criteria:

  • "short": less than 300 seconds
  • "medium": between 300 and 500 seconds (inclusive)
  • "long": greater than 500 seconds

Include a proper doc: string that explains what the function does.

Then, use the build-column function to create a new table called categorized-durations that adds a "category" column to the original bike-table.

Finally, create a bar chart called duration-bar-chart that displays the frequency of each duration category.

Problem 4​

For better readability, it's often helpful to convert trip durations from seconds to minutes. Design a function called seconds-to-minutes that takes a number of seconds and returns the equivalent number of minutes. Include a doc: string and test cases in a where: block to demonstrate that your function works correctly.

Then, create a new table called table-with-minutes that replaces the "duration" column in the original bike-table with durations in minutes.