Could 10 straight weeks of high empty/filled station count be driving ridership down?

Link to this visualisation

 See the green patch in the middle? That was summer. The peak riding season.  From the week of June 9 (Week 23) through the last week of August, theNotSpot Index topped 34 on only two weeks.

For 10 long weeks now, since Labor Day, the Index has been in the yellow zone -- meaning more than 10 percent of the stations were empty or filled during our hourly surveys.

During October, ridership declined 15 percent from the previous year. We read the combination of those numbers this way: that somewhere around the 10 percent level, the inability to get and/or return a Citi Bike crosses the threshold from an occasional inconvenience to frustrating unreliability.

The frustrating part of this to us is that the system operators proved, as summer shows they can hold down NotSpots when they provide the proper staffing.