To date, City of Chicago has published 880 data sets, through its data portal at data.cityofchicago.org/. One of these datasets is Chicago Transportation Authority’s annual ridership data, which can be found here: bit.ly/164e1nI

Even though this data has some minor flaws such as two repetitive months, with a little clean up, I was able to produce some nice graphs.

I wanted to find out if there was any seasonality in terms of ridership and looked at the total which includes rail and bus. Calendar map proved to be fruitful for this task; data sets contain a date field. Filtered by years and displaying the big picture, the chart below shows the rail ridership for 2013:

And then I looked at how often people took the bus in the same year. The chart looks like this:

Notice the light colors on holidays in both years. There are a few clear spikes on the rail ridership chart on a few weekends, one being the 15th of March and the other being 12th of October. This most probably was due to a major event, because we can also observe the same pattern on the previous years.

Here is a link of my dashboard created with Visart (visart.io) software: http://bit.ly/1GQShdH

Simply select the year to see the ridership numbers. Bring the mouse over to see total number of riders. This is a very simple dashboard but gives a good idea about the fluctuations throughout the year.