As Citi Bike Stations Appear, DOT Recaps How People Helped Pick Sites

Eighteen months of meetings, demonstrations and discussion, 14 community planning workshops, and more than 10,000 online suggestions produced a vast quantity of information on where New Yorkers wanted to see Citi Bike stations. DOT’s first task was to code and synthesize the workshop results from nearly 3,000 possible station locations. Locations that received red “No” arrows during the workshops were removed and locations that received significant numbers of green “Yes” votes were highlighted. Suggestions for other stations not depicted on the maps were vetted by DOT staff to ensure they met the technical criteria.

Comments received via the Website or recorded by note-takers at the workshops were added in. Stations that received votes via the Website were prioritized over stations that had not. DOT planners then used a Geographic Information System (GIS) program to create a predictive model for how big each individual station would need to be. The model analyzed the surrounding land use (residential, commercial, parkland, schools, etc.), population, tourism rates and subway turnstile counts and other transit use throughout the program area. The model also made use of newly available taxi GPS data on origins and destinations of trips, as well as durations and times of day throughout the city.

The next step was to marry the public opinion information gathered in the workshops, through the Website, and through months of conversation with stakeholders to the overall map of technically viable locations and the station size model. DOT planners combined all the comments received over the multi-year process with the technical information in order to select one station within each grid square. A wide array of factors – specific requests or comments, neighborhood preferences, proximity to transit and other destinations, distance from other stations, access and proximity to bike lanes, station size in relation to the demand model – were all considered.

DOT staff matched the overall community request profiles also generated in the workshops. For example, in Manhattan, Community Boards 2, 4, and 5 stated strong preferences that stations not be sited on sidewalks, while Brooklyn’s Community Board 3 and Queens Community Board 2 preferred locations on sidewalks. Stations selected in these areas were matched to these preferences.