New York City Citi Bike Trip Pattern in March 2020
By: Hanzhang Yang
Tags: Data, Urban Planning

New York City Citi Bike Trip Pattern in March 2020

Hanzhang Yang is an urban informatics newbie and urban planner.

For this research, I will be looking at NYC Citi Bike data.

Photo by Anthony Fomin on Unsplash

To choosing one month of NYC Citi Bike trip data, the March 2020 data come to my mind. On March 20, 2020, Governor Cuomo of New York State issued a state-wide PAUSE order that would go into effect on March 22, 2020, at 8 PM. With the non-essential businesses being shut down, how New Yorkers use public transportation dramatically changed. How the Citi Bike users utilize this new urban transportation infrastructure, which is seven years old now?

Metadata for Citi Bike trip data provided on Citibike’s website:

Trip Duration (seconds)

Start Time and Date

Stop Time and Date

Start Station Name

End Station Name

Station ID

Station Lat/Long

Bike ID

User Type (Customer = 24-hour pass or 3-day pass user; Subscriber = Annual Member)

Gender (Zero=unknown; 1=male; 2=female)

Year of Birth

Basic Descriptive Analysis of the Citi Bike Trip Data from March 2020 in New York City

Usage by Time

From the March 2020 Citi Bike trip data, we learned that 1,068,457 trips happened during that month, which means 34,466 trips per day. A bar chart for the daily Citi Bike Ridership in March 2020 shows that on March 8, 68,768 trips being ride, and on March 23, only 3,999 trips were ridden by New Yorkers, reflected the city-wide quarantine impact brought by the PAUSE order.

Usage by Age and Gender

Interestingly, the Citi Bike users’ birth year ranged from 1885 to 2004, which is not “true” because the oldest person living currently is Kane Tanaka, who was born in 1903.

We can find a spike in the chart, which means more than 80,000 trips in March 2020 were riding by users “born” in 1963. It is abnormal. So I grouped the trips by birth year and gender.

72,252 trips were finished by users identified as unknown gender and born in 1969. After some research on the Internet, I learned that the default birth year in a Citi Bike user’s profile is 1969. Many users didn’t change their default birth year and gender; maybe that’s why we can found an abnormal number of Gen X using the Citi Bike!

Also, we can found that in March 2020, 3x more ridership was used by the male riders to female riders.

Where is the Citi Bike Station?

In this map, each red dot represented a Citi Bike station, and blue lines are the New York Subway routes. While all the bike docks were concentrated in Manhattan and its adjacent parts in Queens and Brooklyn, some docks could be found outside the New York City. It is because Citi Bike also operated across the Hudson River in Jersey City, NJ.

Most used Citi Bike Station

These five stations were used the most in March 2020, each with more than 10,000 riders started or ended within one month period.

One Citi Bike, number 37042, being rides the most this month. It contributes 384 trips to the total 1,068,457 in March 2020. Let’s see where did it go in March?

OD Analysis with Network X for Citi Bike Trip Data in March 2020

I created spatially located nodes from Citi Bike trip data by extracting station names and both “start” and “end” station coordinates from the data frame and put in trips as edges to this Network.

Incoming and Outgoing Degree

The top 10 stations with the most incoming degree and the top 10 stations with the most outgoing degree were: