If you have tried riding a Citi Bike over the East River, you know that it’s not easy. The bikes weigh quite a bit and the East River bridges that make up your three options all climb about 100 feet in vertical from either side. Nevertheless, when I cross one of the bridges I usually see a handful of brave blue bikers. This got me thinking: How often does that happen? How many people really brave the largest Citi Bike climbs in the system?

The answer: Surprisingly many. The data shows that Citi Bikers have used peddle power to cross one of the three bridges 383,125 times from July 2013 to May 2014 or about 1,100 times a day. That averages to about 1 rider every minute and 15 seconds, 24 hours a day! (Obviously this is much higher in the summer than in the winter, and during the day, but I’m average it all together here.)

These trips make up over 5% of all trips in the system. Slightly more people used the bikes to go from Manhattan to Brooklyn (199,491 trips) than from Brooklyn to Manhattan (183,634 trips).

I made a little Markov Chain to show the riders movements:

The result shows that about a third of all riders who start in Brooklyn are Manhattan bound, while only about 3% of Manhattan Riders are Brooklyn bound.

The distribution changes radically depending on the hour of the day though. We can see that a big chunk of Citi Bikers are clearly commuters:

Interestingly, from 5AM to noon, the flow is towards Manhattan, but at all other hours it is towards Brooklyn. It is also interesting to note that the evening rush hour peak happens in the 5PM bucket for those leaving Brooklyn but in the 6PM bucket for those leaving Manhattan, even though they share the same 8AM peak in the morning.

The dates with the most crossings in history were: August 10th (2,961 trips), August 17th (2,948 trips) and August 3rd ( 2,752 trips.). What do these all have in common? Summer Streets! That shows that if you put the cars away for a bit, the bikers come out.

The top 5 destination for riders from Manhattan to Brooklyn are spread around Brooklyn:

The top 5 going the other way are all below 14th Street:

So to summarize, a whole lot of riders brave the climb. If your on one of the bridges just expect to see a bike rider “out of the blue”.

More Citi Bike Analysis from I Quant NY is here.

-Citi Bike System Data (July 2013-May 2014) available here.

-Borough’s were applied to stations using QGIS intersection on Borough Boundaries shape file here.

-Analysis done with IPython/Pandas

-Charts made in Excel, Powerpoint