Saturday, March 1, 2014

Weekly summary: It was a wild one


NotSpot King of the Week


Fort Greene’s Carlton & Park station, empty for 29.5 hours beginning 3:30 pm 2/24



When 60 stations empty, that's news

This was, in the annals of BikeShareNYC, a wild week. We recorded the most empty stations of the year, 60, on Monday morning. A tweet announcing the NotSpot record caught the attention of  NYToday, resulting in our first media mention. See New York Today: Biking Through the Snow

Better yet, and far be it from us to cite cause and effect, the day following the NYToday piece, the NotSpot numbers started dropping precipitously. By Saturday at 7:30 pm we recorded only 10 empty stations. We hadn’t seen a number that low since Jan. 20. See the Empty Stations Day by Day chart if you’re craving more detail.


Bike count bumps up 1K

The number of available bikes started rising last Sunday when the count stood at nearly 3400. By Saturday there were 1,000 more available.

The highest we’ve recorded is 5674 on Jan. 18.





Top 10 NotSpots, by station and neighborhood


And for the entree, the Top 10 NotSpots in Manhattan and Brooklyn




Manhattan


WEEK 8

NEIGHBORHOOD
STATION
NOTSPOT HOURS THIS YEAR
NOTSPOT HOURS THIS WEEK
1
Hells Kitchen
W 52 St & 9 Ave
282
26
2
Hells Kitchen
W 54 St & 9 Ave
259
45
3
Midtown North
W 49 St & 5 Ave
244
0
4
Midtown North
W 37 St & 5 Ave
226
10
5
Tudor City
E 43 St & 2 Ave
178
0
6
Midtown North
E 53 St & Madison Ave
153
0
7
Lower East Side
Clinton St & Grand St
152
4
8
Midtown North
W 44 St & 5 Ave
149
0
9
Midtown East
E 51 St & Lexington Ave
149
0
10
Civic Center
Centre St & Chambers St
149
12
What we’re seeing in Manhattan is a repeat offenders list. For this season anyway, it’s getting harder to break into the Top 10.  W 52 St & 9 Ave retains  the top position for a second week. And Centre St & Chambers St is back on the list after a well deserved week off.

But the most interesting numbers are in Hours This Week. We did not record any down time at five of the big NotSpots, reinforcing our notion that the system operators are beginning to get aggressive about the chronic outages at these stations.



Brooklyn

WEEK 8 BROOKLYN
NEIGHBORHOOD
STATION
NOTSPOT HOURS THIS YEAR
NOTSPOT HOURS THIS WEEK
1
Downtown
Clinton St & Tillary St
365
38
2
Downtown
Cadman Plaza E & Tillary St
266
0
3
Williamsburg
S 3 St & Bedford Ave
216
0
4
Brooklyn Heights
Columbia Heights & Cranberry St
201
20
5
Fort Greene
DeKalb Ave & S Portland Ave
190
17
6
Bedford-Stuyvesant
Hancock St & Bedford Ave
184
16
7
Bedford-Stuyvesant
Lexington Ave & Classon Ave
182
44
8
Clinton Hill
DeKalb Ave & Vanderbilt Ave
180
2
9
Clinton Hill
Washington Ave & Greene Ave
154
20
10
Fort Greene
Myrtle Ave & St Edwards St
128
26
  • Clinton & Tillary leads the pack for a third straight week. This list, too, is calcifying with only one change in entrants, Myrtle Ave & St Edwards. And both Myrtle and St. Edward have been around the block before.
  • The recent magic in Manhattan has not spread its pixie dust across the river.

Now, the neighborhood Top 10






Manhattan


WEEK 8


NEIGHBORHOOD
TOTAL STATIONS
TOTAL DOCKS
NOTSPOT HOURS
MINUTES PER DOCK
1
Lower East Side
18
518
129
15
2
Times Square
8
422
105
15
3
Hells Kitchen
14
464
87.5
11
4
Tompkins Square
13
403
57.5
9
5
Stuyvesant Town
4
138
19
8
6
Flatiron
5
194
23
7
7
East Village
10
378
29
5
8
Chinatown
5
180
13.5
5
9
Civic Center
3
121
7.5
4
10
Midtown North
15
661
36
3

  • The Lower East Side, after making the Top 10 list for six of its eight week history, finally achieves Lesserness.
  • The Times Square numbers are weird, some stations being knocked out of service for New Years, others for the Super Bowl. What’s becoming apparent is that when bikes are loaded in Times Square stations they skedaddle, le plus rapide.



Brooklyn


WEEK 8

NEIGHBORHOOD
TOTAL STATIONS
TOTAL DOCKS
NOTSPOT HOURS
MINUTES PER DOCK
1
Fort Greene
20
584
264
27
2
Bedford-Stuyvesant
9
205
71
21
3
Clinton Hill
9
249
69.5
17
4
Brooklyn Heights
8
255
71
17
5
Downtown
9
290
61.5
13

  • Fort Greene goes on and off the list, but this week it really got slammed. 
  • Brooklyn’s minute-per-dock number for the week is almost twice as bad as Manhattan’s -- 17 minutes versus nine. (We’ll get to using MPD pretty shortly.)



Yes, February was 22% worse than January


And now, we introduce yet another  stat -- monthly comparisons. Our view is that  performance of the bike-sharing system degraded by 22% in February compared to January. And we don’t think January’s performance will become the gold standard.


We get to the 22% number by dividing the total number of NotSpot hours recorded by the total numbers of docks involved. Why docks? ‘Cause every station’s different, that’s why.

So minutes per dock is the common denominator we use to make sense of it all. We know, minutes per dock is a hard number to wrap your head around. The docks seem perfectly content whether or not they’re entertaining a bicycle. But trust us. Minutes per dock were 9 in January, 11 in Feb. 22% longer down time across the system.


Changes on the blog


We reorganized the section that contains photos of various stations into neighborhood categories. See links on right rail. And in doing so, we had a Light Dawns Over Marble Head moment, realizing that we're never going to be able to visit all 331 stations.

So we’ve started adding station pics from outside sources. This pic accompanied  a NY Post story with our absolute favorite headline,  Old man sues Citi Bike, NYC for $15M after crash.

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