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.