Tableau_CitiBike_Analysis

This Tableau Public storyboard visualizes the discoveries from analyzing data from Citi Bike during the time period of February-March 2020. Below is the summary of the analysis, but the link to the Tableau Public Viz with the full analysis and visualizations can be found here.

Within this time period of February-March 2020, the most frequent start station was in the middle of NYC (at Pershing Square North) with 15,849 Citi Bike rentals. That same station was the most frequent end station with 15,611 end-of-trip bike returns. At first glance it seems like all of the most used bike stations are all in high-population areas. If the map is zoomed in, it can be seen that about 30% of the most used stations are actually located in or very near to low population zip codes (but that might be because they are non-residental areas). Most of the start and end are clustered relatively close to each other geographically, which correlates with the short duration of bike rental trips that will be covered later in this analysis.

Although the frequencies of bike rentals for annual subscribers remain larger than the rental frequencies of short-term customers, the proportion has changed from February 2020 to March 2020. Compared to subscriber rentals, non-subscriber customer rental totals increased from 8.01% in February to 14.45% of the total number of rentals of Citi Bikes in March. Conversely, the proportion of annual subscriber rentals decreased from 91.99% to 85.55% of the total number of rentals from February to March. Also, the total number of Citibike rentals decreased 6.83% from 1,146,830 in February to 1,068,457 rentals in March.

In terms of Start and Stop times of bike usages, there seems to be a correlation between rentals and commute to work hours. Both start and stop times peak around 8am and peak again around 5-6pm. This also makes sense because most bike trip durations in New York City are short, with most being under 20 min. Although the lowest rate of bike rentals occur between midnight and 5am, there are records of bike rentals starting at all hours of the day and night.

Although most trips are short, there are some outliers (like the outliers that raised the average of the 3am start-time). Overall, however, the time of day of the longest bike rental durations occur around 3-4pm (with an average of 19 minutes and a median of 11 min). The shortest bike rental durations (with an average of 19 minutes and a median of 7 minutes) occurred at the start time of 5am.

Overall, this analysis hightlights the importance of having enough supply of Citi Bikes around these high-use start stations (such as those around the area of Pershing Square North), as well as having ample empty slots at end-of-trip stations to ensure that the bike can be returned quickly and conveniently. Although most bike rentals occur around peak commute times, the Citi Bike app and technology needs to be in working condition to accomadate at all times due to bike rentals occuring throughout the day and night. As this analysis takes in account data from February to March 2020, more analysis would be beneficial to show trends throughout the year for future applications.