NYC DoT announces the selection of a bike share operator for New York City, kicking off an unprecedented public input process.
The system name, CitiBike, and sponsors are announced with Citibank as the title sponsor and MasterCard as the Preferred Payment Partner.
In an effort to reduce air pollution, road damage, collisions, and congestion, the New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) researched alternative forms of transportations to service the city of New York in 2008. In an effort to reduce the number of short trips taken within the city, they advocated for and proposed a bike sharing program in which users could borrow and drop off bikes at designated locations. In May of 2013, after some initial delays due to Hurricane Sandy, Citibike began its operations with a total of 332 bike stations servicing 6,000 bicycles.
The above line chart depicts the number of trips that taken each day since CitiBike's inception. While the number of trips consistently dips during the winter time, both the peaks and troughs of the graph show a consistent increase in the use of CitiBikes around NYC.
CitiBike did not expect its bike sharing program to be as popular as it became, especially within its first year of service. Its peak number of travelers within the first year was 42,010 trips, achieved on August 6, 2013. CitiBike encountered numerous issues within the first years, particularly with software and inequality with station demand. Numerous van drivers were hired to distribute bikes equally across stations and deal with the overflow issues that many stations were having.
It wasn't until midway through 2015, however, that CitiBike began to rapidly expand its station offerings. Until then, most stations existed within the Mid and Downtown regions of Manhattan, but have since expanded towards Uptown, Harlem, Brooklyn, Queens, and Jersey City. In fact, CitiBike just announced a partnership with Lyft in November 2018 to aggressively expand both their station and bike counts.
The line graph belows shows the expansion of CitiBike through time. The blue line represents the unique number of stations in existence, and the red line represents the unique number of bicycles that have been use till date. We see a very strong correlation between the two, which makes sense intuitively. It is interesting that CitiBike consistently expands their offerings roughly every 12 months.
In an attempt to see trends in travel preferences across the entire history of CitiBike, a random sample of 1 million points were take to create the below chord diagram. Each arc segment represents a different New York City neighborhood as defined by the city of New York. The color of the segments represent the borough locations within New York. This data was obtained by referencing the latitude and longitude coordinates of each station to the GeoJson polygons as defined by the city of New York here.
Hover over each of the chords to see how people travel from a starting location to their destinations. Hovering over an arc segment will show the percentage of all trips that originate from that neighborhood. Hovering over a chord will show the percentage of riders in each direction. For example, 22.3% of all riders that start from the East Village go to the West Village, and 9.8% of riders that start from the West Village go to the East Village. Lastly, in order to be included in the diagram, the directional pathway required at least 10 occurrences from the 1 million sampled.
Lastly, let's take a look at the distribution of annual subscribers versus infrequent users. The stacked area chart below shows the total number of annual subscribers in a given month, as well as the total number of one day passes and either three or seven day passes that were sold in that month. Up until May of 2016, CitiBike had sold either one year subscriptions, one day passes, or seven day passes, and in May of 2016 switched their seven day offering to a three day one. Hover over each of the bar segments to see the exact values associated with them.
It is interesting to see that after a small dip in annual subscribers in 2015, CitiBike has consistently grown in number of annual subscribers. It is also interesting to see the severe influence has on the number of short-term passes bought. We see a significant drop during winter months when it's cold, suggesting that the annual subscribers make the majority of revenue during these months.
To see more of the day-to-day use of CitiBike, visit our Daily Visualization page.