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A Tale of Twenty-Two Million Citi Bikes: Analyzing the NYC Bike Share System
- spot 11y agoHere's a notebook with analysis of Citi Bike data by Ben Wellington of I Quant NY: https://pub.beakernotebook.com/#/publications/560eb102-736b-4477-98d3-ebeeb5772efa?fullscreen=false https://pub.beakernotebook.com/#/publications/560eb102-736b-... it's missing the maps but shows you how to go right from the raw data.
- CydeWeys 11y agoI know it's a huge nit to pick, but did the editing on the title bother anyone else? "A Tale of Twenty-Two Million Citi Bikes" implies that there are 22 million Citibikes. They're actually numbered in the thousands. The article is an analysis of 22 million RIDES.
- rkrzr 11y agoThanks for the clarification. I was irritated by it as well. It really is a very misleading headline.
- CPLX 11y ago> It really is a very misleading headline. Unless you instantly and intuitively understand that there is not in fact a system whereby 2.8 actual bicycles per city resident were procured.
- twoodfin 11y agoAgree that it's unnecessarily ambiguous, made worse because the obvious interpretation is the incorrect one. OTOH, there's an interesting bit of English going on here: You can "go for a bike" like you can "go for a swim" because "bike" has been verbed for a very long time (in a way that, say, "car" has not, but in some English-speaking countries, "motor" has.)
- dylanh 11y agoThis is true in Dutch to a larger degree than English. It seems several English people learning Dutch on duolingo are confused that there is a verb that means "bike". https://www.duolingo.com/comment/3786991 https://www.duolingo.com/comment/3786991 for instance.
- IkmoIkmo 11y agoStill, you'd never say '10 fietsen/bikes'. You'd in Dutch, just as well as English, say '10 fietsritten/bike rides'.
- Frondo 11y agoThat's interesting, as a native American English speaker approaching 40, I have never heard anyone say "go for a bike". Neither native speakers nor people whose first language is not English. Is this common in some part of the country, or outside the US?
- soperj 11y agoYeah, from western Canada, i'd go biking, or go for a run, but I don't think I've ever said, I'm going to go for a bike. I'd say "I'm going for a bike ride".
- joosters 11y agoI've never heard anyone say it in the UK either. I think the OP's reasoning is off. Just because 'bike' can be used as a verb doesn't mean that it will get used in that way in all situations.
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- EvanKelly 11y agoI think they were trying to have it parse as close to "A Tale of Two Cities" as possible. I agree it didn't work very well.
- CydeWeys 11y agoI take Citibike to and from work every day, rain or snow, if anyone has questions.
- ehmorris 11y agoDuring the winter, are there more bikes available, or do they decrease the supply?
- CydeWeys 11y agoI don't think they take bikes off the road during the winter, or at least, they don't take enough off the road to be noticeable relative to the decreased number of trips that other people are taking. Winter is prime commuting for me because I can always get a bike at the nearest stations. The stations are undersized for peak summer commuting traffic, but fine for winter.
- lil_tee 11y agoNumber of bikes in active use does not seem to change with the seasons: https://github.com/toddwschneider/nyc-citibike-data/blob/master/analysis/graphs/bikes_used.png https://github.com/toddwschneider/nyc-citibike-data/blob/mas... The summer 2015 increase corresponds to the permanent expansion in August 2015; I'm not sure why there was a dip in Q1 2015
- CydeWeys 11y agoThe chart says "Unique Bikes Used Per Day". Q1 2015 was a very cold winter, and I can imagine the system being so under-utilized that there were many bikes that sat unused through an entire day.
- galdosdi 11y agoI used to commute with Citibike but switched to private bike because (rush hour) Citibike parking was often a pain (finding empty docks in a mostly commercial area where everyone is riding to and not from in the morning, and vice versa). Now I only use Citibike for true "one way" use cases like getting to the train station to go out of town. How has commuting with Citibike gone for you? Has it gotten better over time? (I stopped over a year ago, but I hear Citibike has gotten better in general) Do you still ever find yourself riding around looking for an empty dock? (I actually imagine that that's less of a problem when the weather is bad due to lower ridership)
- davidjhall 11y agoA great idea but we had a major flaw near us in the Financial District --- no parking!!! We had a station outside our office, but in the morning, the station was full -- you had to go find another station that had open slots -- sometimes a long way off, somewhat defeating the point to begin with.
- Coincoin 11y agoThere are trucks that are supposed to resupply the various stations, transferring bikes from popular full stations to popular empty ones. Maybe they did not have time to figure the patterns to do that optimally yet. I know it took a couple of years here before it was better.
- avn2109 11y agoThis is still very much the case uptown, too. Try finding a parking place in Flatiron on a summer weekday morning.
- bwilliams18 11y agoI think his analysis is flawed because the Google Maps routing algo highly favors the bike lanes throughout the city, often taking you out of the way to use them.
- rubidium 11y agoHe acknowledges that limitation throughout the article. What's your point?
- xsmasher 11y agoOnly the "most popular roads" would suffer from that flaw; and the "day in the life" animation.
- jbooth 11y agoMost people who are commuting probably don't look at Google Maps every day to figure out how to get home. They're taking the bike lanes because they're safer.
- Spooky23 11y agoThat would make the decision for me. I considered biking, in my city, until two colleagues were seriously injured in bike commutes.
- CydeWeys 11y agoAs a regular biker in Manhattan, let me tell you, the map isn't exaggerating. 8th, 9th, Broadway, 1st, and 2nd really are the best ways to go north and south in Manhattan, precisely because of those segregated bike lanes. In addition I'll sometimes take the paths along the Hudson and East River (which this map emphasizes). For a long north/south trip, say, 80 blocks, I'll much sooner go over an avenue or two to use one that has a bike lane than go all 80 blocks on an avenue that doesn't have a bike lane. You have to pedal fast to keep up with traffic enough to not be unsafe when you're mixed in with motor vehicles on an avenue, and I don't have the endurance to go that fast for 80 blocks, especially not on a heavy Citibike.
- edelans 11y agoNice viz ! That's awesome to have such a dataset available, kudos Citi Bike ! I wish we had the same openness here in Paris, I would love to compile the same view for velibs (that's how our shared bikes are called). All we have is an API for bike station data https://developer.jcdecaux.com https://developer.jcdecaux.com :/
- festizio 11y agoI tried Citibike when it came out, but there were no bikes in either direction of my commute way too frequently. I have read that they have improved it, but I haven't tried it recently.
- shmerl 11y ago> For what it’s worth, most Citi Bike trips start and end in Manhattan That's because Manhattan has the huge majority of Citibike terminals. In Brooklyn it's still virtually non existent (yet it has a high population density).