I haven’t posted in a while as I’ve started working for CARTO in late June. It has been a great opportunity to work with one of the most innovative mapping and locational data companies. I was only a CartoDB employee for a week before we dropped the ‘DB.’

Anyway, I have been super interested in Car2Go ever since it came to Brooklyn. I’ve had a few difficulties with my account not being able to unlock and start cars in Bed-Stuy but this may be due to signal strength to their cars (I hope they work this out). I used its several times in Brooklyn and my partner Kim is in Seattle and I’ve been out there quite a bit and find it very useful there. Due to the ease of parking in Seattle and the fact that the Car2Go service area includes the central part of the city (unlike in NYC where Manhattan is outside the service area).

What’s most interesting (this map confirms my prior belief, though, I’d like to show some plots and do a deeper dive) is how in Seattle, during the work day Car2Go’s are all over downtown and South Lake Union (where Amazon and many other tech and medical companies are) but at night they are so much harder to find. It seems a lot of folks use Car2Go for commuting.

So anyway, I scraped their API every 5 minutes for a week (Sunday afternoon-Sunday afternoon). And then decided just to keep the points closest to the nearest hour, (thus rendering 5 min. scraping naught, could have just done on the hour), and then jittered the time for both privacy and better animation so its randomly within the hour. I brought this into CARTO Builder and used our standard tools for vizualizaion for about 20 minutes.

Car2Go Week of 2016/8/7-2016/8/15

Note: time-slider may show differing times if in non-EST timezone, as data was uploaded in EST and may be offset by difference, testing needs to be done

Car2Go Week of 2016/8/7-2016/8/15 Lines