5 Days. 5 Challenges. 5 Dashboards. 5 Blogs.
This week the first Melbourne cohort of the Data School takes on Dashboard Week. It is only fitting that the very first Melbourne cohort takes on the data from the City of Melbourne Open Data where we explore the Census of Land Use and Employment (CLUE). As someone who completed their final university exam for my Data Analytics degree at Kensington, I felt the need to focus on that region of Melbourne as a somewhat tribute. Aside from Flemington Racecourse, I didn’t know much about the area despite driving through the area countless of times. So I made a dashboard that looks at the distance of businesses close to Flemington Racecourse when Spring Racing Carnival goers may want to go before or after their day at the races.
Check out my Day 1 Dashboard here: Day at the Races
A Little Context
The Spring Racing Carnival is a horse racing event where there are several races around Victoria but Flemington Racecourse hosts the most prestigious events which are Derby Day, Oaks Day, Stakes Day and most importantly, the Melbourne Cup where us Melburnians have a public holiday.
These events are normally attended by thousands and thousands of people who enjoy the fashion, the gambling, the day drinking… And the horse racing.
The Data Preparation
In Alteryx, I combined 3 different datasets from CLUE which contained information about the businesses in Melbourne, the venue capacity at Pubs, Bars and Taverns and seat capacity at Cafes and Restaurants.
In the above screen shot, some notable tools that I used here to prep my data:
- The Map Input tool (middle container – block with the globe symbol) which allows me place a marker in the map and keep the location’s data as a Spatial Object
- Distance Tool (the bear trap) which allowed my to calculate not only the distance between the starting point and business but also the drive time and drive distance
With all these tools, I now have data that contains the business trading name, the industry that they belong to, their coordinates, capacity (if a venue) and the drive time and distance from Flemington Racecourse.
Learning about Kensington through Tableau
In Tableau, I did some more filtering of the data to obtain only the relevant industries that might associate with going to the races. Supermarkets and other retail shops for some necessities to prepare for the long day, Liquor stores to start the day drinking and beauty salons/hair dressers for those who are ready to flaunt their outfits for the day. After the long day at the races, there may be some who are hungry and wanting to drink (or gamble) more since the night hasn’t even begun at this point.
When I immediately plotted out the businesses in the map, I noticed immediately that there is mainly just one street with most of the relevant businesses.
Despite that, I thought the insights that I found was quite interesting the more I built around it.
Here were my insights for the Viz:
- For almost all industries that I grouped them by, the closest business was mainly at the same location because it was at a shopping centre
- The exception being Pubs where the closest is at and where most are located in the north-east part of Kensington
- Kensington doesn’t have a large amount of business for most categories except for Food where there are 42 of them in that category
- The racehorse Twilight Payment, 2020 Melbourne Cup winner, ran 3200m in 3 min 17.34 sec and based on that, it would’ve ran the distance far quicker than a car trying to drive to it’s destination of the same distance (doesn’t even take into account that traffic is far worse around Kensington during Spring Racing Carnival)
DAY 1 COMPLETED! Only 4 more days to go…
Thank you for reading the blog and 4 more blogs coming soon!
