This shiny application analyzes data on CTA stations which can be found at Chicago Data Portal. The application provides the user with different types of visuals to analyze the data. The goal of this application is to be able to look at the number of rides for a particular station for any given date. It was made to compare the CTA entries or rides between different stations from 2001 to 2021.
As mentioned before, the data that was used can be found at these two links: Long and Lat Data and Rides Data . Since the data file was significantly large after it was downloaded as a csv file, it was split into smaller csv files. After splitting the data files into multiple small csv files, it was read into R to create a data frame. Then these two data frames were merged to include the location of the station with the rides data.
The project is located at the GitHub link above under smulle7Branch which is used for deployment. To run the application in RStudio, it is required to download the files to a new folder on your computer and then opening the 'app.R' file inside of the 'app' folder. Make sure all the data files are in the new folder that was created.
It is also important that all the packages required to run this application are installed in RStudio. To make it easier, here is a list of packages need to be installed prior to running this application:
Then click on the 'run app' icon located at the top right of your 'app.R' script in RStudio. After running the app, click on the 'Publish' button that is located at the top right of the window in order to the deploy. Make sure all the data files and the files are selected and that it is the right account.
Next, click publish! This should open a link in the web browser.
It was surprising to see that Lake/State had the highest number of entries rather than O'Hare station because O'Hare is one of the busiest airports in the United States.
The map shows that there are more orange and red markers towards the loop of Chicago rather than the ones on the outskirts of Chicago. This shows that there is more traffic at the stations that are closer to Chicago.
This graph shows the comparison between 09/19/2019 (red bars) and 08/24/2021 (blue bars). There is a clear difference between the two dates because of the pandemic. It was interesting to see how there is a significant decrease after Covid.
Now if 09/11/2018 and 09/11/2019 were compared. It is clear that there is not much of a difference between the two different colored bars as there was no pandemic between these years.