Visualizing My Bike Rides

My three main interests are programming, writing, and food and wine.

You'll notice exercise isn't on that list. In fact, quite the opposite: My primary interests are all anti-exercise. But I grudgingly acknowledge its value, and I've decided to "trick" myself into exercising more by turning it into a programming project.

I live close enough to work that I can commute on my bike, and so I've started a project to gather data on my rides and do interesting things with that data, inspired in part by Cooper Smith's visualization of Nike+ data from New York City. Since I need a lot of data to make useful visualizations, I'm riding more consistently to get it. And hopefully by the time I have enough data, the bike riding will seem routine.

I picked up a couple of bike tracking apps for the iPhone, but have settled on Abvio's Cyclemeter, based on the recommendation of a co-worker who is both a data geek like me and an avid cyclist. You press Start on your phone, ride your bike, and press Stop when you're done. It gives graphs, maps, and all sorts of other goodies.

Getting to the data is then just a minor step: All of these apps seems to support exports in KML and GPX. Since these are actually just my rides, that data isn't all that interesting by itself. I know how I get to work.

But with that data, I can create meta-analyses. For instance, how does my speed look across a given ride? Here's a ride I took from the Saturday Berkeley farmers market to Berkeley Bowl, our preferred grocery store.

Green lines indicate places where I was faster than my average speed for that ride. Red lines indicate places where I was slower. I add in the Start and Stop pins, and also provide meta information about the ride off of the extra data in Cyclemeter's GPX file: total distance, average speed, and so forth.

Ruby made this work pretty straightforward. I use Nokogiri to parse a GPX file and calculate the velocity between subsequent points. Each velocity item has the coordinates and timestamps of the two points as well as the calculated velocity. I then use an ERB template for the KML I want to create. That ERB template sets up the styles and other items, and then uses the state variables to construct the line segments, the start/stop pins, and other items.

Eventually, I want to add arrows indicating the direction (which is more useful when you're looking at lots of overlapping routes), pins for the slowest point and the fastest point, and other items.

That will do for individual routes, but I also plan to start aggregating my rides to show even more data.