Overview

In the past ten years, bikeshares in Washington, DC (DC) and New York City (NYC) have grown in popularity. They offer a convenient transportation and recreation option for both locals and tourists to get around each city. While normal patterns, such as day of the week and time of day, are already known to affect the use of bike shares, the effect of recent Covid-19 related disruptions on ride demand and patterns has not been explored. This project aims to visually show how ride patterns change around the cities in conjunction with the still unfolding Covid-19 pandemic.

Background

Human cases of Covid-19 were first confirmed in Wuhan China on December 31, 2019 (Custis). From there, the virus quickly spread around the world at a breakneck pace, aided by its highly contagious nature and the lack of scientifically based data on how to effectively treat this new disease. In response to the growing threat posed by the pandemic, government officials in both NYC and DC introduced first of their kind regulations to try to stem the infection rate. Nonessential businesses were forced to close, citizens were urged to forego nonessential tasks outside the home, and public transportation schedules were greatly reduced. In conjunction with the government response, entities in the private sector in both of these cities initiated mass work from home policies. Every facet of everyday life, including transportation patterns, was disrupted across the country including in these two cities, on a level never before experienced. Although this analysis originally focused on Covid-19 related influences on bikeshare patterns, during the course of the project I uncovered trends related to the unprecedented “Black Lives Matter” protests which occurred across the country following the murder of George Floyd in police custody. This project will also touch on how rides changed in response to these activities and how patterns were also impacted by the government’s response to these new events.

Definitions and Elements to Note

  • This analysis looks at rides catalogued by each bike share in the time periods of March through June 2019 and 2020.
  • In order to draw comparisons of how the Covid-19 related disruptions have affected ride share patterns, this project will use the same time period the previous year as the basis of comparison for normal patterns. While this does not represent an ideal baseline as shifting populations, varying weather patterns, and other factors likely also influence rideshare patterns, looking at the same time period is as close as close a comparison as possible to what regular patterns in the year 2020 would have been.
  • This project considers March 1, 2020 as the official start of the pandemic as that is the day that the first case was officially diagnosed in NYC (Goodman). The first case in DC was confirmed 6 days later on March 7, 2020 (Custis).
  • Members are defined as those who hold a yearly bikeshare membership, while Causal users are defined as those who do not belong to either bikeshare in any capacity.
  • Commuters are defined as those who take a ride using the bikeshare between the hours of 6am to 10am or 4pm to 7pm on Monday through Friday.
  • Weekends are defined as rides occurring on Saturday or Sunday. Weekdays are rides that took place Monday through Friday.
  • Rides that last longer than 5 hours were removed from the dataset as this cataloguing was likely due to data errors given the structure and cost of the membership model for both bikeshare systems. Rides lasting less than 60 seconds were also removed.

Capital Bikeshare

The Capital's first and only station Bikeshare.

Started in 2010, Capital Bike Share is a short-term bike rental service in the Washington, DC area. The service is a popular means of transportation for commuters, tourists, and urban adventurers. There are currently over 4,300 bikes in circulation and over 500 docking stations located strategically across the DC region (Pascale). Since its inception, over 25 million rides have been taken using Capital Bikeshare. For 2019, Capital Bikeshare averaged 280,000 rides each month. Rides averaged 9-10 minutes for registered users and 23-25 minutes for “causal” users. (Perry-Brown)

Citi Bike

NYC's and the Nation's largest Bikeshare

Citi Bikeshare opened in 2013 and is NYC’s most widely used bikeshare. In 2018, the system catalogued 17.6 million rides for the year and a daily average of 48,315 (NYC.gov). On June 6, 2018, the system hit 60 million rides taken. Since then Citi Bikeshare has continued to grow in both amount of stations, bikes available, and rides taken, aided by city sponsored partnerships including “Reduced Fare Bike Share,” which offer reduced cost memberships for low income residents, and “Prescribe-A-Bike,” a health focused initiative. Currently, there are 14,500 bikes in circulation at 500 stations across the NYC area (CITIBIKENYC).

Timeline of Events

Washington, DC

New York City

Key Findings