Did you know you can adopt a bench in the most famous park of Amsterdam, the Vondelpark? For the amount of €3.000 for individuals or €5.000 for businesses you will get your name, logo or message on a bronze plaque for the next 40 years! 

Interested? Take a look at the site of the Vondelpark.

It turns out the data about which benches are available and which benches have already been adopted is available to play around with in the open data environment of the city of Amsterdam (an absolutely lovely place to check out btw). They also show the benches on a map.

This map shows that there are quite some benches still up for adoption, and that there are quite specific popular places where a lot of the benches have been adopted already.

I was curious if next to the specific places, there are other ways to look at which benches are the most popular.

In the dataset next to some identifiers you can find the coordinates, the type and the rotation of the benches, and of course whether they are adopted.

The rotation sounded like an interesting way to look at some extra insights.

First of all, you can see that the orientation of the benches follows the general orientation the Vondelpark is in:

Not all directions have the same adoption rate, as is clearly visible in this graph.

The Northwest-North direction has the joint lowest adoption rate, and since there are so many benches in this direction this is the direction where you have the biggest choice. Most of these are located along the largest route through the park, and their orientation is obviously not the best for enjoying the sun.

In this scatterplot you can see all the benches that are in the Park. Their location on the plot is based on the rotation of the bench.

The colors and the crosses are a link to the coat of arms for Amsterdam!