Data: New Yorkers Keep Biking In This Cold, Cold World
It’s a cold hard fact: Even in the city’s historic deep freeze, New Yorkers are getting around by bicycle.
New York City’s recent snowstorm and subsequent cold snap has let snow stick around like a bad houseguest, but has not zeroed out bike activity in the Big Apple, according to the city’s bike counts and publicly available Citi Bike data.
Department of Transportation automatic bike counters picked up plenty of two-wheeled action in the more than two weeks since snow and cold slammed the five boroughs 191,868 cyclists passed by DOT’s 18 bike counters between Sunday, Jan. 25, the day of the snowstorm, and Monday, Feb. 9 — representing just a fraction of the total bike trips in the city.
That number included more than 80,000 bike trips over the four East River bridges. Even on the day of the storm itself, the bike counters picked up 2,094 hardy souls braving Gotham’s winter wonderland on two wheels.
The Jan. 25 snowfall was followed by some of the coldest days on record — including this past weekend, when wind chills knocked average temperatures well below zero. On Saturday, as 50 mph wind gusts combined with near-freezing temperature, 988 cyclists still crossed over the Williamsburg Bridge.
And despite the sub-zero temperatures and the issues with snowed-in docks, Citi Bike saw daily ridership in the tens of thousands.
New Yorkers took around 50,000 Citi Bike rides per day on weekdays over the last week — and over 20,000 on Saturday and Sunday when the cold reached its absolute nadir, according to Citi Bike Stats, an independent website that tracks bike-share usage.
“This shows New Yorkers are a hardy folk, who love biking year round, and that biking is mainstream way of getting around the city,” Transportation Alternatives Executive Director Ben Furnas told Streetsblog. “It shows what kind of pent up demand there is for cycling, and what an opportunity there is for Mayor Mamdani to make our streets the envy of the world.”
The numbers are obviously well off of typical bike counts in the five boroughs, even in the dead of winter. Last year, for example, DOT’s bike counters picked up 397,672 bike trips between Jan. 25 and Feb. 9. Citi Bike has hit the 100,000 trip milestone on plenty of days this winter.
But the numbers show that, even as the Department of Sanitation leaves bike lanes across the city unplowed, people on bikes need them — whether to safely make deliveries for wages or simply to get around.
“When you build cycling into the lives of residents and businesses, you then have to maintain the lane network, the greenways, bike share and bike parking 365 days a year in all conditions,” said Jon Orcutt, a former DOT official and longtime bike advocate.
