Citibike Analysis

Background

As one of the most popular eco-friendly commute tools, bike is especially well-known for its effects on environmentally friendly, daily exercise, and money savings. With the emerging public bicycle sharing system, Citi Bike has expanded the usage and popularity of bike riding. Over the past eight years, Citi Bike has successfully grown average ridership numbers to above 100,000.

Project Objective

This project aims to provide a deep insight into the Citi Bike history including the user demographic distribution (age, gender, and user type), time-series analysis (overall bike usage growth and the influence of covid), and the station's geographic distribution. All data used in this project can be found in the Citi Bike public data site.

Citibike Dashboard

User Demographic Information

As shown in the graph, the majority of the Citibike Users' ages are in the range of 30 to 39 years old. The second most popular age range is 40 to 49 years old. Data used for this graph is collected in 2021 with over 100,000 records.

As shown in the pie chart, over 70% of the users have paid membership plan with the Citi Bike

As shown in the graph, the overall number of biker users displays a continuously increasing trend from 2014 to 2019. Gender-wise, we see the number of male users largely outnumber the number of female users.

Time Series Analysis

This graph calculates the average number of hourly trips for every hour during the day for the whole year. We observe two pick hours during the day and the afternoon at 8 am and 5 pm. This trend makes sense because those two peak hours are the regular working and off-working schedules for the majority of people.

This time series chart displays the daily sums of trips from the year 2014 to 2022. The overall bike usage steadily increases over the year. We also observe the impact of Covid on bike usage, the Covid started in early 2020 and was followed by a city-wide lockdown period which displays in the graph that bike usage didn't grow as expected.

Station Geographic Distritbution

The above graph is a New York State borough bubble map with each bubble indicating the location of each Citibike start station. From the distribution of the bubbles, we can see the majority of the stations are located in the Manhattan area with the others scattered around the Manhattan area.

The bar chart above shows the top 10 busiest start stations among all stations, the rank is based on the number of trips started each day. All ten stations are in downtown Manhattan.

Final Observation and Conclusion

  • Since the day Citi Bike started its full operation, the number of users and the number of trips have steadily increased each year.
  • The number of male users is always our numbered the female users. We observe most users are between the age of 30 to 39.
  • Citi Bike mainly operated in the Manhattan area and the area surrounding the Manhattan area.
  • We observe over 70% of the users have a membership and the rest are the one-time user.