Make Over Monday: Economic Value Of The Bicycle Industry

This week for Make Over Monday we are looking at dataset for the economic value of the bicycle industry in the UK. Cycling is one of my favorite hobbies so I was excited to jump in and make some fun visualizations.

Because I love bicycles, and I thought they would make for great visualizations, I wanted to use custom shapes for my graphs this week. I imported a custom icon of a bicycle to be used across my visualizations.

For the first visualization I wanted to take a look at the number of manual bicycles that were imported each year. I added a dual axis with the same data to create this bicycle carousel effect. I felt that adding the bar graph element made it easier to see the change in trends and the significant decline that the bicycle industry experienced in 2016.

Next, I thought it would be interesting to see how manual bicycle imports compared with electric bicycle imports. This graphic shows that while electric bikes may have carved out their own portion of the market, manual bikes still make up the majority of the imports.

Finally, I thought that it was important to show electric bikes in their own visual which shows a sharp climb in imports in 2015

With a sharp rise in 2015 that then fell significantly in 2016 I was curious what could have caused this fluctuation in the market. For answers I went to my local bike shop pro. He explained to me a little of the history behind the e-bike and how it continued to develop over the years. He explained that this rise was likely due to the development of a better battery and ingratiation of that battery into the frame. E-bikes saw a rise in popularity after these improvements. He also had a possible explanation for the decline. He explained that in his experience E-bikes were a one time purchase, he did not see customers coming in the next year to upgrade to a new model. If a large population of riders interested in E-bikes bought theirs the year that the improved design came out it could explain how the number of E-bikes needed would then decline the next year.

I had a lot of fun this week learning some new skills in Tableau I focused on using custom shapes and dual axis in all of my visualizations and love the different stories in the data I was able to show using these techniques.

Did you participate in Make Over Monday? I’d love it if you would share a link to your visualization and share any useful insights you learned.