There's a guy who is working to take his picture with every Citi Bike numbered 0001 through 0100. An impressive venture. But, if you happen upon Citi Bike #17279, you have got your hands on the busiest Citi Bike in all of NYC.


I myself have not knowingly stumbled upon that bike, but I wanted to profile the life of that work horse here. So without further ado, here is a look at Citi Bike 17279 and some facts about how much work it has done to keep NYC moving over the 242 days it was tracked:

The bike has been used 1,341 times, or an average of 5.5 times per day. That's compared with an average use rate of 851 times for all bikes.

or an average of That's compared with an average use rate of 851 times for all bikes. It was rebalanced 158 times (when a bike goes from one station to another without a registered ride. This is often a van "rebalancing" the bikes.)

(when a bike goes from one station to another without a registered ride. This is often a van "rebalancing" the bikes.) It has been riding for a total of 19,606 minutes or 326 hours. That's an average of 82 minutes every day.


Impressively, it has visited 284 of the 330 stations in the system, or 86% of all stations. The following map marks the stations that it went to along with the number of visits that the bike made to each station. (It only missed 9 stations in all of Manhattan!)

The average age of a rider was about 38 years old; the median age was 36 years old; the most common age was 28 years old. A distribution of ages for the bike is shown below:


So that's one busy bike. The biggest challenge to finding the mysterious bike? Sadly, the ID numbers released in the Citi Bike do not seem to match the numeric IDs on the bikes. I suppose this was a privacy issue. So your guess is as good as mine as to what the printed number is of this mysterious bike. One thing is for sure though: the bike gets around.

Data can be found here.

Top image: NYCDOT

This post originally appeared on I Quant NY and is republished here with permission.


Ben Wellington is a visiting assistant professor at the City & Regional Planning program at the Pratt Institute. His blog I Quant NY tells stories gleaned from analyzing NYC Open Data.