How People Use Citi Bike under the pandemic?
COVID-19 is changing the ways we get around cities. Under stay-at-homes orders and limited business operations in New York City, we can see a sharp decrease in the street activities at the peak of the pandemic. Also, the impact of the pandemic is laid bare in urban mobility patterns, especially the public transport system with the risk of overcrowding. In this case, Citi Bike, as one of the alternative transport modes, becomes some people’s choice for going out and has less decrease in the number of trips than mass transit.
Nowadays, with the reopening policy in NYC, we want to know how people in NYC use the Citi Bike during the pandemic to better inform the decision for providing public services in the future by focusing on the recent bike-share data in September. The detailed topics and research questions are:
Who is using bikes? Where do the trips occur?
Whether low-income people use bikes more or not?
Who is using bikes?
More than 2.4 million trips were taken during the one-month period in Sept., an average of 82,940 trips per day. In the view of user age of all the trips, we can see the most users were born in 1990, with the percentage of 5.48% of all the trips. By classifying different age groups, the 26–30 age group and 31–35 age group have 526,186 trips and 412,054 trips, 23.9%, and 18.7% of total trips respectively. It shows the main users of the bike-sharing system in Sept. 2020 are young adults of 26–35 age, a very diverse demographic. The younger side of them may be just entering the workforce or in the first few years of their careers. Others, the 30+ group, maybe having children and purchasing a home for the first time. These groups are less likely to have their own cars and use more public transport services. Also, they are affected most by the restraints on public transport, like subways, during the pandemic.
In the view of the gender of users, the males use more than the females, with 65.8% and 34.2% of total users respectively. For the main age groups, the rate of the number of males and females is higher than the percentage of total users. Besides, we can see the 73.1% of users are the annul members and 26.9% are the 24-hour pass or 3-day pass user. It shows that long-term users obviously use more bike services than short-term users during the pandemic.
Where do the trips occur?
The trips start at the 1,087 stations around Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx in NYC, an average of 2,289 trips in each bike station. The heatmap above shows the distribution of trips in each station and we can see the trips are more located in lower Manhattan. Among all the stations, the top 10 stations with over 10,000 trips in Sept. are located in the lower and midtown Manhattan. The most popular station is W 21 St & 6 Ave in midtown Manhattan and over half of these stations are located near Hudson River Greenway, Hudson Park, and Central Park where is a good place for people’s daily leisure. People in these areas are more likely to access bike services than other areas. At the zip code level, we can see the number of trips distribution in NYC. Most trips are concentrated in the zip code 10003, the East Village neighborhood, with 5.25% of total trips.
Whether low-income people use bikes more or not?
Under the current pandemic, the low-income people, as one of the vulnerable groups, are more affected by the restraints on the public transport system. In this case, whether they would use more bike services than wealthier people or not is a curious topic. In detail, my research question is that if there is a relationship between household income and bike service usage. I hypothesize that these two have a negative relationship, which means people with lower incomes are more likely to use the bike services. To verify my hypothesis, I use the median household income at the zip code level in 2018, as independent variables, collected by the American Community Survey. For dependent variables, I use the number of trips, trip duration, and subscriber user rate to represent the bike service usage respectively.
From the distribution map and scatter plots, we can see that the household income at the zip code level have a positive relationship with the number of trips and subscriber user rate, and have a negative relationship with the average trip duration.
To explain this outcome, the first thing is to make sure whether the variables can represent our hypothesis concepts. Under the consideration of bike service supply and population in each zip code area, the variables may not be suitable for us to represent the bike usage. On the contrary, the average trip duration that ignores the difference in service supply capacity and the population is the better variable. From this view, the negative relationship, with the correlation coefficient of -.4978, between median household income and average trip duration in each zip code, to some extent, can prove my hypothesis. It means that the change in income can explain the 49.78% change in average trip duration. The wealthier people tend to ride in a short time and the lower-income groups are more likely to ride more in each trip.
Implication and Limitation
In this research, we find that young adults of 26–35 age are the main users of Citi Bike and explain about half of the number of trips in Sept. 2020. Besides, the distribution of these trips is concentrated in lower and midtown Manhattan, especially near open green space. Finally, as the main research question, we can find the negative relationship between median household income and average trip duration in each zip code, which reflects that the low-income groups use more bike services than wealthier people. Meanwhile, the number of trips has a less clear relationship with income with the reason that the supply of bike services is more concentrated in Manhattan with higher household income. To further understand the relationship between income and bike usage, we should take supply capacity and population into consideration.
Data Sources:
Median Household Income by Zip Code in NYC, 2018, American Community Survey 5-Year Estimate, US Census Bureau, Url: https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=median%20income&tid=ACSST1Y2018.S1903&hidePreview=false
Zip Code Boundary, 2018, Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DoITT), Url: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Business/Zip-Code-Boundaries/i8iw-xf4u
Citi Bike Trip, 2020/09, provided by its operator NYC Bike Share, LLC, Url: https://www.citibikenyc.com/system-data
