Citi Bike launched 100 days ago, and a pair of friends, Michael Yap (Class of 2012) and Zach Davenport, set out to explore just how much New Yorkers loved these bicycles. Using publicly available data, they created graphics to tell a revealing visual story of the program.
Yap explains the instigation for the project by email:
Ever since Nicholas' class, I've been collecting compelling data sets. When I discovered Citi Bike began publishing its data to their website, I began obsessively monitoring the feed to see if any insights would emerge. Over time, I would ask a series of simple questions then see if the data could provide an answer. For example: Do members ride less when it rains? Turns out, when comparing the data to weather reports, it's true. After asking lots of questions, insights emerged, some boring, others REALLY interesting. Zack and I began to cast away the boring ones to tell the story of those remaining. Fast Co. Exist reports on the visualization: Davenport and Yap mapped out the ride behavior for more than 80,000 people who signed up for annual memberships. They take the total number of trips and average daily number of trips, and compare them to those in bike share programs in Paris and London. As the newest program with the fewest number of bikes and docks, New York comes in third in total number of trips. But, interestingly, New York beats out London for average number of daily trips. This could stem from the way New Yorkers seem to use the bikes: for very short trips. They found trips to average 19 minutes despite the 45-minute limit for annual members.
Don’t miss seeing the project in its entirety! Nice work, both.
