Austin Bike Thefts June 28, 2016

This visualization takes a look at bike theft data for Austin in 2014. KXAN News recently did a story on how the Austin Police Department is using a bait bike to help reduce the number of bike thefts this year.

I wanted to see when and where that bait bike might do the most good, so I put together this interactive visualization. I was looking for a good way to show clusters of thefts, so I decided to try hexbins. I think they do a good job of showing the concentration of thefts around the city. You can use the slider below to adjust the bin size to see how it impacts the visualization.

I debated whether or not to use a real map such as Google or Mapbox, or to create my own from shapefiles. In the end, I chose the latter as I felt like a real map added a lot of visual noise with the roads and landmarks. Seeing how Austin has some rather distinctive geography, I think this approach serves the purpose well.

Dig into the data yourself, and see what you think! Leave any comments on Reddit