I know where your mom likes to ride her bike

Every Citi Bike route is favored by a certain demographic, from young men to elderly women.

For most Citi Bike riders, the click made by a securely docked bike is a welcome indication that they are no longer responsible for that bicycle or the heavy fees that come with loss or damage. But for anyone interested in analyzing Citi Bike’s macro trends, that click means the ride is officially over and logged, and the information is being beamed to some central repository.

In total, there were nearly 14 million Citi Bike rides in 2016, a figure larger than the previous year’s 10 million but probably smaller than wherever this year’s tally will end up as the program expands. Since subscribers, who are required to provide their age and gender when signing up, account for nearly 90% of Citi Bike rides, we can actually calculate some of the relevant demographics:

Males take 75.6% of all Citi Bike subscriber rides

People born after 1980 take 49.6% of all Citi Bike Subscriber rides

Reducing the tens of millions of rides that covered over 200,000 unique routes to isolated figures feels a bit blunt though. Instead we can sort the data by routes, since the starting and ending stations are logged for each trip (as an example, a route might start at the northwest corner of Union Square and finish at the Battery Park dock).

We’ll focus exclusively on routes that attracted at least 1,000 rides in 2016, since otherwise a single person could conceivably dominate the demographics — an uncommon trip taken by the same 28-year-old male to work every day will merely be a proxy for his personal profile.

Let’s first sort those routes, of which there were 774, by their median age. To be clear, each thin sliver represents a single route, and they have been arranged in ascending order.

The results are a little “choppy” because age is logged as birth year and thus is not truly continuous. What we can tell is that the average rider for most routes is between 30 and 40 years old.

The interesting routes are the end points though: the youngest route, with a median age of 21 years, goes from University Place and E. 8th Street to Third Avenue and E. 12th Street. This short trip cuts through the vibrant East Village neighborhood, and with it New York University’s main campus, which makes it no surprise that it logs as Citi Bike’s youngest popular route.

Clocking in as the oldest, with a median age of 53 years, is the route between Penn Station and Park Avenue and E. 47th Street. This one’s a little harder to explain — the path is a bleak crosstown jaunt through one of the city’s busiest commercial districts, and doesn’t seem like it would be preferable for any demographic in particular.

Let’s sort the routes by percentage male:

Even the most female-heavy routes are only about half and half. In particular, the route from Broadway and W. 29th Street to First Ave and E. 30th Street is taken most frequently by women (44.6% of the time), while the route from Dyer Ave and W. 42nd Street to Third Avenue and E. 58th Street is taken most frequently by men (a whopping 99.7% of the time).

Teasing out explanations for gender differences is a little bit more difficult, but we can try to characterize the routes. The female-heavy route is shorter, cuts across the borough of Manhattan (avoiding the avenues in doing so), and ends up near the East River waterfront. The male-heavy route is a longer, more vertical trip through the heart of midtown, likely making it a stressful, congested ride.

To atone for my clickbait title referencing mothers, I’ll focus on my own mom, who was born in 1961, for a final segmentation. Of all the routes taken in 2016, which was used most frequently by 55-year-old females? That would be First Avenue and E. 68th Street to Third Avenue and E. 12th Street, an impressive trip of nearly four miles. Way to go, Mom!