I 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.
Agree 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.)
That'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?
Yeah, 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".
I'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.
My knowledge of grammar isn't great, but isn't bike(-ride) working as a noun here? I can use it as a verb and say "I biked here this morning" or "it's faster if you bike across the bridge". But I've never heard "I'm going for a bike", or going for a "20 mile bike". Bike ride is what sounds natural in those sentences.
And yet you can "go for a run/jog/walk/swim". English is weird. I guess it's because bike as a noun already means the bicycle itself, while there is no object named "run/jog/swim".
This 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 for instance.
A 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.
There 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.
I 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)
Yeah, empty docks are a big problem for me when the weather is pleasant, because (like a typical tech worker) I get in pretty late. It's not uncommon for me to have to walk almost half of my commute in the morning in the summer until I find a station with a bike. And sometimes the nearest stations near my apartment are full at night too, if I get home later.
That's actually why I love commuting in the winter the most. I never have any problem getting bikes at the closest station when it's below freezing.
I dream of them adding enough stations and enough bikes to the point where this is no longer a problem. They do some rebalancing, which helps, but it isn't consistent enough to rely on.
Several reasons, in descending order of importance:
a) I don't have anywhere to store a bike in my apartment. My work has a bike room, but it's less convenient to use than the Citibike station right on the street. My roommate used to keep her bike locked up on the street at our apartment, and it got stolen only a few months after she'd gotten it.
b) Even if I owned my own bike, I might still have Citibike anyway, because there are trips that I make (usually at night) where I use Citibike to go meet up with people somewhere, and then we continue traveling using other modes of transit, such as cab or subway. Being able to leave a Citibike behind is really nice.
c) Maintenance. I don't have to worry about it at all beyond pressing a button when returning a Citibike that's misbehaving. There's a non-trivial amount of maintenance involved in keeping a commuter bike running (especially one that's ridden in rain and snow), and I just don't have to worry about it at all.
Most of the people I know who use CitiBike use it as one leg of their commute. One of my coworkers, for example, takes the PATH in from New Jersey then bikes to the office from there.
In these cases you could buy a bike and leave it in the city, but there's a very very serious risk of bike theft. It's easier to pay for the CitiBike membership and not have to worry about it.
I wish someone took economy of scale and produced a resilient bike tracker so cheap it could be embedded in the factory. Bike theft is the main reason I don't use my bike anymore (sic).
I take BABS (Bay Area Bike Share), the equivalent system in and around San Francisco, which is similar in nature to the Citi Bikes program. In fact they use the same bike model. I have 2 bikes of my own, but it's more convenient to hop on any random bike and drop it off without having to bring a lock. Sometimes I also want to go somewhere to meet people and then we walk or take the train/bus back. I live in SoMa, where most stations are, and I rarely walk anywhere these days since BABS is more convenient, and more fun. The only complaints are that all stations are around SoMa and the financial district (being addressed soon) and that the bikes are too heavy, about 40lbs which is a problem in a hilly city.
Discovering this was the first and last time I used the bikes in Montreal. It didn't help that the bike station was at the bottom of one of the steepest hills in downtown MTL. It also didn't help that two of the first bikes I selected were broken and had to be returned for another.
In New York, no one has space to keep a bike in their apartment. Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it is an issue. It's certainly an issue for many here in Boston, where Hubway bikes are popular. I ride my own bike to work, but I have a shed I can keep it in.
I 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.
The 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.
Nice 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 :/
> 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).
I 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.
I 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.
As 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.
Most 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.
