Downloading and Visualizing Denver Bike and Ped Data with Python and Kepler.gl

Hello everyone,

It’s been a while since the last time I published an article. I had a little bit of spare time in between jobs. So, I decided to write a new one that explains how to download publicly available bike data from the city of Denver and visualize it using KeplerGl library for Python.

By the way, I started working as a Lead Traffic Modeler at Ulteig. Please check out the company and if you are in the transportation business, hit me up!

This article has actually become the first part of a series. The reason I started doing all this to check whether there is a difference before and after COVID19 in terms of bike ridership and pedestrian counts. However, the CDOT make bike and pedestrian counts available two months prior to today’s date. Therefore, it only goes up to Feb 29th, 2020. I will definitely revisit this in the future to do that comparison!! Let’s start

First, let’s import the libraries we will use:

The next thing we will try to do is to automate bike and ped data downloads from CDOT’s website. To achieve that, we first need a list of stations that we are interested in. I selected pedestrian and bicycle sensor stations with continous counts. If you take a look at that stationUrl you can see that it is easily modifiable. We need to send a post request using that URL to get the list of available ped and bike stations.

There was a lesson for me to learn here. After a couple of failed attemtps, I realized that dtdapps.coloradodot does not require security certifications. So, the best solution is to bypass certificate validation completely by adding verify=False. Once you run the code block above, you should see something like the…