Citi Bikes used 30,000 times on a busy day: #CitiBikeData

Citi Bike released a trove of data Monday about all rides taken for eight months. Open data advocates have complained about Citi Bike’s unwillingness to share data, but now it’s out.

The data runs from July 2013 to February 2014. Here’s what the data includes, and while it obscures riders’ identities, it does give birthdays and gender:

• Trip Duration (seconds)
• Start Time and Date
• Stop Time and Date
• Start Station Name
• End Station Name
• Station ID
• Station Lat/Long
• Bike ID
• User Type (Customer = 24-hour pass or 7-day pass user; Subscriber = Annual Member)
• Gender
• Year of Birth

With the release, the company is asking that users share their creations with the tag, #CitiBikeData.

“On a busy day, New Yorkers choose to get somewhere on a Citi Bike more than 30,000 times. When and where those rides start and end represent the minute-by-minute pulse of neighborhoods, showing how people get around throughout the day,” said Frank Hebbert, Director of Open Plans, in a release from Citi Bike. “Not that long ago, city planners relied on decade-old census data to make decisions. Now, anyone can use the data coming from Citi Bike to help illuminate the complex dynamics of travel, land use and more.”

Citi Bike will soon be one year old. As The New York Times reported, while it has been wildly successful in terms of ridership, unexpectedly low revenue (locals love the unlimited plan, but tourists are skeptical about day passes) and unexpected expenses (a long list that starts with Superstorm Sandy) have run it into tough times. Unfortunately, it has met with those tough times under a new Mayor who is not as favorably disposed to bike share as his predecessor.

So is it any sort of surprise that this is the moment at which it finally gets open and transparent about its data? It’s one thing to say that it’s clear that the new option has become integral to the city’s transit infrastructure, but, with this data, its nerd allies are going to be able to demonstrate that in powerful ways.

In fact, it’s already started. Along with the data, NYC Bike Share released the video below, which shows every single ride taken in the city for a forty-eight hour period last September. It starts at midnight, so it’s pretty slow at first. You can see that Manhattanites are the night owls, though, while Brooklyn stays in bed.

Then, by morning, Manhattan is gushing and Brooklyn is moving. The real surge in Brooklyn activity is from 5pm to 7pm, as everyone comes home. It’s clear that the density of stations and people in Manhattan has really made ridesharing huge there. It’s a bit slower here (probably in part because drivers here are insane).

The video comes from the NYU Rudin Center in collaboration with linepointpath.

BetaNYC has organized two hackathons around this data already. Here’s the first and here’s the second.