Thirty days of biking in Berlin

Guillermina Sutter Schneider

Hi, I’m Guillermina, product specialist at Datawrapper. I’m all about keeping tabs on what I do to understand myself better. So, guess what? For a whole month this summer, I tracked all my bike rides in Berlin. This is what I learned.

I had to have a project to work on during the summer. And since I love tracking (sometimes random) things, I decided that project would be to spend 30 consecutive days making a record of every time I hopped on my bike. Many times I was carrying my cello with me. (No, it’s not very heavy — but when the weather gets windy you might feel like you’ll fall off your bike.)

I used the GPS Tracks app to to first track and then download all my rides. Besides geodata mapping each route, the app also gave me a nice summary of my total and average riding time, distance, and speed. After looking at this summary, I was surprised to learn that I rode my bike faster while carrying the cello! (That might have been because of the time that I had to pedal super fast to make it on time to my cello class after getting lost and having to make two U-turns on a busy street.)

Here are some insights I collected from my rides:

Remember how I mentioned downloading the geodata of each bike ride? I uploaded it into Datawrapper to create a locator map. Once I saw all my rides on the map, something became evident: Except for Mondays and weekends, my daily biking routes looked very similar to each other! I highlighted on the map the places I bike to the most (my apartment, my boyfriend’s apartment, the office, and my cello teacher’s apartment) and some others I went to on particular days of the week.

If you click through the different colored buttons, you’ll see what route I took on each day. And if you’re wondering how you can add buttons like these to your Datawrapper visualizations, you can learn how to do it here.

From the map, you’ll be able to tell that Mondays were the days when I biked the most by far — a total of 74 km (and I had my fastest speeds then, too 😄). Tuesdays were the quietest days, when I worked mostly from home. I spent Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays usually biking between my boyfriend’s apartment, my apartment, and the office. The only time I got on the bike on a Saturday was to go shopping in southwest Berlin. On one Sunday afternoon, I biked 8.5 km to Plötzensee (a lake in the northwest of the city). That was my longest ride.

Have you ever tracked your bike rides? If so, I’d like to know how your data compares to mine! Feel free to drop me a line at at guillermina@datawrapper.de.

That’s a wrap (and a lot about biking) for now. Hope you follow me in my next tracking endeavor! Next week, Elliot will take over our Weekly Chart series with data on driving in the U.K. — we’ll see you then!

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Guillermina Sutter Schneider

(she/her, @gsutters) is a product specialist at Datawrapper and part of the sales team. She helps you get the most out of the tool through public webinars. A data visualization designer herself, Guillermina likes coding, color theory, numbers, and Berlin — not necessarily in that order.

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