Average Air Fares at Washington Dulles International Airport: Q1 1995 to 2010
SOURCE: Bureau of Transportation StatisticsI recently started exploring the wonderful world of JavaScript libraries for charting and thought I’d share my work here. I’m really looking forward to broadening my interactive data visualization skills beyond Flash, and here’s just one example. Raphaël and gRaphaël are two JavaScript libraries by Dmitry Baranovskiy that allow you to create clean and simple interactive visualizations.
Being the travel junkie that I am, I thought I would use air fare data to dive into Raphaël visualizations. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics recently released updated stats on average air fares from the top 85 airports in the country. The chart above uses Raphaël’s simple line chart script to graph the average price of air fare fro Dulles flights in the last 15 years. Below, I used the gRaphaël pie chart script to visualize a breakdown of flight delay causes at Dulles airport in May.
Flight Delays by Cause: Washington, DC Dulles International (May, 2010)
When I travel, I usually alternate between the three airports in the Greater Washington Area: Dulles, National, and BWI. It’s widely known the BWI has the cheapest fares (but is four times farther than the other two). National sometimes has some of the best domestic travel flight deals and is only a ten minute ride from my house. But usually I fly out of Dulles — mostly, because it offers the most flights. I hope to test more visualizations later comparing data from these three airports.