This week's Top 10 NotSpots

OK, before we even start this discussion, we posit the following:

1. Is a CitiBike annual membership worth the $100? Absolutely.

2. Is it a mode of convenience or is it a spoke in the transit system? The answer is, right now some of both.

With membership approaching 100,000, CitiBike has already answered a question it may not have asked itself. Is bike-sharing part of the mass transit system?

A Streetsblog story back in November put daily weekday bike trips at just shy of 40,000.  The PATCO Speedline, a hugely complicated rail system connecting South Jersey with Philly and Trenton, has about the same ridership.

So that’s where we come from when we start discussing labels like “worst station.” It’s not about worst. It’s about reliability. And the nub of it is that the stations that make the NotSpot list are NotReliable.

About reliability and the current state of affairs: To get there requires a sense of urgency. The MTA has that. So far we see a system that views 15 or 20 empty stations at dawn as  a perfectly normal way to start each morning.

Manhattan

WEEK FOUR	NEIGHBORHOOD	STATION	NOTSPOT HOURS THIS YEAR	NOTSPOT HOURS THIS WEEK	NOTES
1	Midtown North	W 37 St & 5 Ave	85	9
2	Midtown North	W 49 St & 5 Ave	77	25
3	Hells Kitchen	W 52 St & 9 Ave	76	13.5
4	Civic Center	Centre St & Chambers St	70	0	most hours snow related
5	Midtown East	E 55 St & Lexington Ave	68	0	most hours snow related
6	Hells Kitchen	W 54 St & 9 Ave	67	17
7	Chelsea	10 Ave & W 28 St	62	0	most hours snow related
8	Midtown North	E 53 St & Madison Ave	62	15
9	Tudor City	E 43 St & 2 Ave	58	14
10	Chelsea	9 Ave & W 22 St	58	0

Clearly, the problem is most acute in Midtown and the neighborhoods to the east and west of it.

Brooklyn

WEEK FOUR	NEIGHBORHOOD	STATION	NOTSPOT HOURS THIS YEAR	NOTSPOT HOURS THIS WEEK	NOTES
1	Downtown	Clinton St & Tillary St	200	25.5
2	Williamsburg	S 3 St & Bedford Ave	176	0	most hours snow related
3	Clinton Hill	Washington Ave & Greene Ave	121	12
4	Clinton Hill	DeKalb Ave & Vanderbilt Ave	115	34.5
5	Downtown	Cadman Plaza E & Tillary St	105	10
6	Bedford-Stuyvesant	Lexington Ave & Classon Ave	104	46
7	Brooklyn Heights	Columbia Heights & Cranberry St	95	5	most hours snow related
8	Fort Greene	Myrtle Ave & St Edwards St	92	23
9	Fort Greene	Carlton Ave & Park Ave	86	30
10	Fort Greene	DeKalb Ave & S Portland Ave	77	31

Given that Brooklyn has only 79 stations vs Manhattan’s 252 we should only be doing a Top Five for the borough. But Brooklyn’s No.10 equals Manhattan’s No. 2.

How to read the charts

What’s a NotSpot? A NotSpot is a bike-sharing station that is empty or filled at the time we conduct a survey. We then follow that station to determine when it’s serving or accepting bikes again.
What’s a survey? A survey is when we peruse the data provided by the official map and the data provided by a map produced by the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis. We conduct two to three surveys Monday through Friday.

About the rankings:  We take the total NotSpot hours produced by all stations in a neighborhood and divide that by the total number of docks there. The "hours per dock" is as close as we can get to a common denominator.