Bike share programs have been a popular choice for public transportation in many major cities, an Des Moines, Iowa is hopnig to start a bike share program of their own! While using data from the NYC Citi Bike share program during August 2019, visualizing the data that supports the decision to bring bike shares to Des Moines will help bring in more investors.
- Python Pandas
- Jupyter Notebook
- Tableau
Peak hours of riders using the NYC Citi Bikes were 7 am – 9 am and 5 pm - 7 pm. This is visualized in Figure 1.
Figure 1:
Diving deeper into how the Citi Bikes are used, we can display the number of trips per weekday and hour. While we found that the peak hours for riders in August 2019 were 7 am – 9 am and 5 pm - 7 pm, many riders, as seen in Figure 2, were utilizing the bikes during these times during the week rather than on the weekends (Saturday – Sunday).
Figure 2:
Looking at the trip duration in the figure above it seems that most of the trips were a little less than 10 minutes and not much longer than 60 minutes. See Figure 3.
Figure 3:
One key part of the data collected from NYC Citi Bikes was the breakdown of usage between genders. In Figure 4, you can visualize this breakdown- most riders seem to be male.
Figure 4:
We know from the gender breakdown, that there are more men using the bikes than any other gender. Yet, in Figure 5, we can also see they make up the majority of subscribers, too. Subscribers of the bike-sharing program tend to use the bikes more frequently. What’s cool to see is that Thursday seems to be a busier day for subscribers, while the customers seem to be using the bikes more on the weekends.
Figure 5:
Revisiting the Trip Durations, we can break down this data by gender in Figure 6. It is noticeable that when the trip duration is broken down by gender, more men tend to take longer trips compared to women. However, overall duration seems to be similar between the genders.
Figure 6:
After reviewing the gender breakdown and learning that more men make up the majority of subscribers, we can now explore how the genders are each utilizing the NYC Citi Bikes by looking at usage per weekday and hour. We found that the usage looks quite similar between the genders both men and women. However, it is noticeable that men have more usage during the lunch hour than women and seem to be heavier users on the weekends. You can explore these subtle differences in Figure 7.
Figure 7:
The collective visualizations show that the NYC Citi Bike share program has been successful and many people living in New York City subscribe to the program which can be profitable! The data positively supports the decision to start a bike-share program in Des Moines, Iowa!
In that conclusion, I do suggest that more analysis will be helpful for Des Moines to succeed in this endeavor. One suggestion would be to analyze bike share data from a city that is similar in size and region. New York City has a population of over 8 million, while the population in Des Moines is a little over 200,000. Chicago, IL, or St. Louis, MO may be more comparable to use for further bike share analysis.
Another suggestion for future analysis would be to analyze commuter data and visualize the number of people who commute to work and by what means, car, bus, carpool, walk, etc. Based on the graphs the typical commuting hours seemed to have the most usage, and it may be useful for Des Moines to further visualize starting and ending locations during the commuting hours to further support that more public/shared transportation would be beneficial and profitable for the city.