Learning out Loud in Milwaukee, WI

2014 Capital Bikeshare Data

The red Capital Bikeshare bike

I stumbled upon a fascinating article on Chart-It this week about Capital Bikeshare’s 2014 data. Bikeshare makes its data available and Chart-It did a wonderful job of breaking down ridership and bike usage for the year 2014. Some highlights:

  1. Nearly 80% of rides are made by “registered members,” that is someone who is paying the monthly rate, not a tourist or “casual rider.”
  2. Registered members, despite taking more rides, take rides that are, “on average, 61% shorter” than casual riders. The average ride for a casual rider lasts 38.2 minutes with a wide standard deviation of nearly 51 minutes.
  3. 3% of rides taken by registered members last longer than the free 30 minutes.
  4. The longest rides lasted nearly an entire day and cost the user “around $100”
  5. 2.9 million rides were taken last year over 50 million minutes. “That’s about 90 years of bike rides.”

On the bikes:

  1. There were more than 3,000 bikes in operation during 2014
  2. Of those about half of them were active throughout the whole year.
  3. Some bikes work much harder than the rest: “the busiest 15% of bikes carried out about 72+% more rides,” over “more than 159 hours.”

2014’s hardest working bike was a beast, but you’ll have to read about it yourself.

What’s more interesting than simply the numbers is what they tell us, or could tell us, about the city. What can we say about the fact that the hardest working bike finds itself most often at the most frequented stations? What can we say about how people get around our city if bike rides among people who live here last less than 30 minutes? Does that mean it’s possible to get everywhere in less than 30, or does it mean local riders are clever enough to return their bikes before they have to start paying more for the ride?

It will be fascinating to see Chart-It’s follow on posts about stations and routes and tends over the last four years of Bikeshare.