Part 3: Where Are The Bikes?

So, where in DC are these bikes, exactly? Don’t worry, you don’t need to know the finer points of DC geography.

DC is made up of eight wards. Wards 1, 2, and 6 are in the dense heart of DC. That’s where you’ll find most of the landmarks that make Washington famous. To the east are Wards 7 and 8, which are together known as East of the River, because they are (you guessed it) almost entirely east of the Anacostia River.

Generally, people who live East of the River also have way less income than the rest of DC. The median Ward 8 household made $30,910 in 2015, just above the federal poverty line at the time, which was $24,250 for a family of four. Compare that to Ward 3, where the median income was $112,873!!!

There’s been a lot of discussion about making sure bikeshare is serving all communities — not just the wealthy few. So we set out to answer one question as part of that larger puzzle. We wanted to know: are dockless bikes equitably distributed East of the River compared to Capital Bikeshare?

Here’s how we figured this out: Every 10 minutes, we checked how many bikes were available in each ward. If, for some reason, there was no data from even one bikeshare operator at a given moment, we chucked all of the stats from that point in time. (It ended up not being a big deal: we only had to chuck out five percent of the data.)

Even with the numbers in hand, counting bikes is tricky because the flow of bikes changes constantly. On weekdays, people tend to ride downtown in the morning and back home at night. We couldn’t just measure each ward at a single point in time every day if we really wanted to understand how bikes are distributed across the city. So we looked at all of the points in time — by calculating the median number of bikes available in each ward, using all the checks we made every 10 minutes.