Bicycling

Using Citi Bike Data to Chart Trips, Miles, Membership, and Outages

Citi Bike is on pace to surpass 40,000 annual members sometime today, and users had made more than 212,000 trips between the Memorial Day launch and yesterday at 5 p.m. These numbers, reported daily on the Citi Bike website, have provided a continuous source of data that Google software engineer Antonio D'souza has charted to illustrate the program's growth.

By Stephen Miller

4:49 PM EDT on June 14, 2013

Citi Bike is on pace to surpass 40,000 annual members sometime today, and users had made more than 212,000 trips between the Memorial Day launch and yesterday at 5 p.m. These numbers, reported daily on the Citi Bike website, have provided a continuous source of data that Google software engineer Antonio D’souza has charted to illustrate the program’s growth.

Meanwhile, Citi Bike’s software problems have also provided an impetus to build new tools. By flagging stations that have not had activity for three or more daytime hours, WNYC created a map that identifies stations which may currently be inoperable. A glance at the map this afternoon indicates that very few stations are reporting a “flatline.” Of the handful that haven’t seen recent activity, almost all are at the periphery of the system, where they may simply not get much use.

Eventually, Citi Bike is scheduled to create a data portal on its website, similar to the open data page for Capital Bikeshare in Washington, DC. For those looking to learn more about working with Citi Bike data, OpenPlans (Streetsblog’s parent organization) is hosting a Citi Bike data night on June 26, where developers will be able to hear from NYC DOT Director of Web and New Media Neil Freeman and demo their apps using Citi Bike data.

Stephen Miller

In spring 2017, Stephen wrote for Streetsblog USA, covering the livable streets movement and transportation policy developments around the nation. From August 2012 to October 2015, he was a reporter for Streetsblog NYC, covering livable streets and transportation issues in the city and the region. After joining Streetsblog, he covered the tail end of the Bloomberg administration and the launch of Citi Bike. Since then, he covered mayoral elections, the de Blasio administration's ongoing Vision Zero campaign, and New York City's ever-evolving street safety and livable streets movements.