Heatmaps are an easy way to look at data when you have a lot.  The heatmap below is from a 30 day traffic count.  You can easily and quickly see that peaks in the morning are northbound, peaks in the afternoon are southbound, and peaks on the weekend are in the midday.

Heatmap

There isn’t a ton of code needed to do this:

Data to play with

This method could be used with shorter-term data with fewer steps.  I used this 30-day count because it tells more of a story than a two or three day count.