Anyone ever thought about incorporating weather data?

[Tim Kelley]

wunderground.com has a weather API for developers:

http://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/

[Justin Antos]

Here's a basic correlation (http://jdantos.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/capital-bikeshare-usage-and-weather/) between daily temperature and Bikeshare trips. What do you think?

[acc]

Of course. Who, in their right mind, wants to be riding a bike in temps below 40F? Or rain? Or snow/ice? Because we are battle-hardened idiots we forget two important facts:

1. It takes a certain level of skill to ride a bike.
Having a sense of balance and rhythm are important. Not everyone can do this.
2. It takes courage to bike in traffic.
It takes skill and toughness to wade into several lanes of traffic and be confident.

We do this everyday. It has become second nature to us and by extension, sometimes we make the leap in logic that everyone else should assume the risk we do. I believe that is unrealistic.

People who participate in Capital Bike Share have my applause. It isn't easy.

Ann

[zanna_leigh]

Here's a basic correlation (http://jdantos.wordpress.com/2012/03/01/capital-bikeshare-usage-and-weather/) between daily temperature and Bikeshare trips. What do you think?

You asked for daily temp/precipitation for 2011. I used to collect monthly weather data for my old job using NOAA (http://www.noaa.gov/) NOWdata. You can select Daily data for a month from the National Airport (or any other location) and it provides "daily maximum, minimum and average temperature (degrees F), heating and cooling degree days (base 65), precipitation, snowfall and snow depth (inches) for all days of the current or previous month." So it only gives you the current or previous month but: "Additional stations and months of data are available from the Regional Climate Centers and the National Climatic Data Center."

Here's the link to the NOW data: nowdata.rcc-acis.org/LWX/pubACIS_results

The observed weather tab offers some other queries. Play around with it, I'm sure you can find what you're looking for...