Introduction

Citi Bike is NYC's bike sharing system. With more than 300 stations and 34,000 rides each day, Citi Bike serves as the last mile solution for public transportation network. However, balancing bikes at stations has been a great challenge. Bike stations may be emptied or overwhelmed in certain peak time periods. If weekday trips are more of a commuting tool while weekend biking is more likely to be for leisure, different bike allocation and balancing strategies may apply due to different rider behaviors (e.g., longer commute, different origin-destination clustering, etc.). This research thus aims to answer the sub-question of whether or not weekend trips last longer in average in comparison with weekday rides.

Data

The data used in this analysis is retrieved from Citi Bike's open trip data. The time range was specified to all trips that took place in January 2015 for this analysis. Since the original data only contains the most basic format of start and end of trip timestamps, I process the data in order to extract an indicator for weekends that allows me to group all trip data by weekdays versus weekends. The preliminary exploratory analysis of data, as shown in Fig. 1, shows that most trip durations are within half an hour.