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Capital Bikeshare had a lot to celebrate when it turned five years old in September 2015. As we mentioned in our first bikeshare post, the program has grown from 10 stations in downtown D.C. to over 350 stations across the District. Congressional lawmakers are talking. Last month, two congressmen introduced a bill that would define bikeshare programs as public transportation in order to make such programs eligible for funds dedicated to public transportation. That being said, local governments are able to use federal grant money on bikeshare programs like the District’s planned $2.5 million expansion of 40 stations and 435 bikes.
With all this growth and some time since our last bikeshare post, we figured it’s time for part 2! Our first post focused on bike stations and exploring which neighborhoods had the most stations and where bike share stations where grouped by ward. For this post we focused on bikeshare trip history from 2010 to 2014. We looked at things such as how has membership type (casual vs. registered) changed over time? Which neighborhoods have the most bikeshare trips? The results were interesting to say the least!
Data notes: Several of the trips were not counted for our analysis, as they either started or ended outside of the district boundaries. Approximately 10-15% of all trips occur outside of the district. Also: These visuals are not embedded with live interactions since the dataset is reasonably large (over 8,000,000 records) and can cause issues on slow connections. Click on all images to see the interactive data sets at tableau public!
Image may be NSFW.
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This first visual represents the total number of bikeshare rides from 2010 to 2014, color-coded by bikeshare membership type: casual and registered.This visual allows us to quickly see some really interesting things about bikeshare growth overall and the differences between casual and registered members. It’s easy to see why more funding is being poured into this program when you consider the fact that the program has grown by over half a million users a year since its inception. It’s also interesting to see the gap between casual and registered users which widens each year. In 2013, there were over 1 million more registered user trips than casual user trips. This number grew to 1.4 more million in 2014. We can also appreciate how much ridership has grown when we see that half of all casual member trip rides from 2010 to 2014 occurred in 2014 alone.
This visual shows you the top 10 neighborhoods where a ride was started. We also visualized the yearly total rides for each neighborhood so you could see what years each neighborhood may have had noticeably more or less rides and other yearly trends. We were interested to see that only two neighborhoods showed identical growth rates from 2012 to 2013 and 2013 to 2014. Logan Circle/Shaw (9% per year) and Adams Morgan (7%) were the only two neighborhoods in the top 10 that showed the same rates. When it comes to growth, Monumental Core shows no signs of giving up the top spot as it saw the largest percentage of growth from 2012 to 2013 (14%) and 2013 to 2014 (20%).
This last visual shows us the top 10 neighborhoods where a ride started from 2010-2014. We further broke down the data by casual/registered user to get an idea of the similarities or differences between the riding patterns of each user type. The District Ninja team was really interested to see that 7 of the neighborhoods are in the top 10 for both casual and registered users. This gives us a better idea of how popular these neighborhoods have really been for starting a trip. We were also interested to see that there isn’t a station within the shared 7 where there have been more total rides by a casual user vs a registered user.