Citi Bike, a bike sharing system in New York City, released the data for their first eight months of service. I thought it would be interesting to see where people go after leaving the most popular starting point.
I decided to look at January 2014. By doing some summarizing, I was able to find out that the most popular starting station was Pershing Square North. What I found out about this location is that it is right across the street from Grand Central Terminal. This information made my analysis much more interesting because I can now see where people go after getting off the train.
I created a .gexf file with 241 nodes and 240 edges. The nodes were the geographic coordinate locations of each station and the edges were the links between the starting and ending stations. Each node included three attributes: latitude and longitude (both in degrees), and a size count for that station.
Using Gephi and the GeoLayout plugin, with a few layout expansions, I was able to graph the locations of the stations. Figure 1 is all of the locations that Citi Bike users went to, with the red circle representing the starting point. Figure 2 is the same data except each station is now weighted.
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| Figure 1 Locations where Citi Bike users end after leaving the red starting point. (Click to enlarge) |
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| Figure 2 Weighted locations where Citi Bike users end after leaving the red starting point. (Click to enlarge) |
After plotting the nodes, it is clear that Citi Bike users went all over New York City after leaving the terminal. From the weighted visualization, users were more likely to travel to a station closer to the terminal, with many of the users ending their trip around East and West 31st Street.
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