Myrtle Beach Harley Spring Bike week vs BikeFest/Black Bike Week Police Stats

First off, it's been a long time since I've written here on my blog.  I had such high hopes of myself being more involved in blogging about Tableau, but I just couldn't find anything that really interested me, until today.

Being that I have recently moved to Myrtle Beach, it's interesting finding out about things that you don't know about when you're just here for a week or two on vacation.  One of those things Harley Davidson Spring Bike week and BikeFest aka Black Bike Week.  Both of these event happen in May, with Harley Bike week occurring first, and BikeFest happening over Memorial Day weekend.  We knew about the Harley Bike week as I like to get Harley Davidson T-shirts from the cities I've visited, and I have a Bike Week shirt from a couple years ago.  We found out about BikeFest from my uncle, who's a former policeman in North Carolina.  When we told him we were moving to Myrtle Beach, he was like stay away from BikeFest because it's dangerous, and from looking up the news on it from last year he was right.  I mean there were 8 shootings, and 3 people were killed.  That's some scary news to read about as you're planning a move.   Now after we get here, and get settled in, it's all we've heard about since January. Local news is always sharing what's going on for Memorial Day weekend, and the City had a plan in place to try and prevent events like last year from happen.

With both events being over, local police are sharing data  regarding both event.  I think this is mostly because people try to compare and contrast the two events, saying Harley Week is less violent than BikeFest, and those sort of things.  Being a VizWiz, data guy, I look to the data to tell me what goes on.  I mean, I feel like I'm a pretty open minded guy, and I like motorcycles, so I want to have an unbiased view of the data, which event gets in trouble more.  Is it the Harley guys, or is it the sport bikers of BikeFest?

Today, North Myrtle Beach PD, released their data on both events.  At first glance, I was like "WTH is this telling me?  It made no real sense to me, as it was just a jumble of lines, in two separate graphs. My immediate response was "I have to put this in Tableau"

North Myrtle Beach PD Stats for both Bike weeks

Along with these graphs, they provided a data table, which if you look at it, it shows there were more arrests during Harley week than BikeFest, this doesn't take into account that Harley week is longer.  There is more opportunity for someone to get arrested.

North Myrtle Beach PD data table 

This made me say even more, I need to know more details.  This looks like Harley week could be more dangerous than BikeFest, could the public be wrong?  So I transferred the data to a nicely formatted Excel "database", and I calculated the number of data for each event, and came up with a Average Per Day Count for both events.

What does using an Average per Day tell us?  I feel like it gives us a better picture of what's going on over time.  Harley week is around 6 days, and BikeFest is 3-4 days.  There's more time for you to get busted for something during Harley Week, right?  So I built my dashboard around this Avg Per day, by Category (Arrests, Tickets, Warning, Traffic Accidents, M/C (Motorcycle) accidents) for both events, and through in a trend line, so we can see is it getting better or worse?

Below, I have my completed dashboard (after the break), which if you use Tableau, this took a shot time to put together, but you get big results.  We can quickly see, side by side how each category compares between events.  The good news is, in number of Arrests, both events are trending down, but per day average, there are more Arrests during BikeFest than Harley week.

Screen shot of Arrests by Event

Overall, it does appear that incidents are trending downward, but with BikeFest being shorter, the data shows it's the rowdier group.  But that could be because the median age of the BikeFest attending is most likely younger.  It would be nice to get a little more detail behind the data.  I would love to get a break down, by day, age, the offense, and all those little details.  I could build something really cool with that, hint hint wink wink North Myrtle and Myrtle Beach PD :-).

I hope to have Myrtle Beach data soon, so check back, as I will update the dashboard, to get even more insight into both events.

I hope you like my viz!

Thanks for reading!!

Todd

Myrtle Beach Harley Bike Week vs Bike Fest Police Incident Comparison