Using both one-way and round trips from the data, bikers rode nearly 250,000 miles. Enough milage to circle the globe 10 times. Enough milage to have 110 people bike the Tour de France. Enough milage to bike 3/4's of the total miles of roads in the state of California.
According to FRED data, The average gas price in L.A during this stretch of time was $3.29. According to the EPA, the average MPG of a car in the U.S is 24.7 MPG. Using these estimates, clients saved $800,000. This cost excludes the implicit cost of commuting via bike instead of car or transit. Considering that Los Angeles is notoriously known as one of the most traffic condensed cities, the opportunity cost of riding a bike rather than commuting on transit or car is very likely to be far lower. Therefore, if I was to estimate the true economic cost, bike share users would have saved millions.
According to the EPA, burning one gallon of gas creates 20 pounds of carbon dioxide. As mentioned before, the average MPG of a car in the U.S is 24.7 MPG. This means that bikers prevented over 196,100 pounds of CO2 emmisions. While biking reduced pollution, biking alo helped clients get a good workout. If we assume that biking for one mile on average consumes 38 calories, all clients combined burned a total of 9,202,978 calories.
We can seperate each day into three segments - morning, lunch, and rush hour - and determine the most popular start and end locations.
The most popular starting station in the mornings is at 668 N Figueroa St, Los Angeles, CA (34.063179, -118.24588) right outside of Chinatown. This bike station is known as Figueroa & Cesar Chavez.
During the conventional lunch break (12 pm - 2 pm), it would be smart to allocate many bikes in the station on 350 E Third Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013 (34.04681, -118.24353). This station is known as 3rd & San Pedro.
Finally, during rush hour post work it would be smart to allocate many bikes to the station at 723 S Flower Street, Los Angeles, CA 90017 (34.04855, -118.25904799999999). This station is known as 7th & Flower.
If we follow the same format as finding the most popular starting stations we get the following.
The most popular ending station in the mornings is at 723 S Flower Street, Los Angeles, CA 90017 (34.063179, -118.25904799999999). This station is known as 7th & Flower. This is the same location as the most popular starting location in the evening. This implies that several people commute to here in the mornings and from here in the evenings.
During the conventional lunch break (12 pm - 2 pm), the most popular ending station at 350 E Third Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013 (34.04681, -118.24353). This station is called 3rd & San Pedro. This is the same location as the most popular starting location for lunch time. This means that several people take advantage to bike from their work, which is near 3rd and San Pedro, to eat somewhere and then return back to the same spot.
Finally, during rush hour (post work) the most popular ending station is at 532 W Olive Street (34.04855, -118.25904799999999). This station is called Olive & 5th.
The aggregate average distance traveled is 1.82 miles on 131472 total trips; average distance on one way trips is 1.10 miles in 118690 trips; average distance on round trips is 8.7 miles in 12782 trips.
To calculate the distance traveled in one way trips, the Distance Matrix API from Google Map's was used. This API estimates the amount of time the path requires, the total distance, and directions. The distance traveled in one way trips amounted to 130690.67 miles. Since round-trips have the same start/end station, it is important to understand how people bike in urban cities. A conclusive study in Copenhagen determined that the average biking speed in an urban city was 9.6 mph. From this estimate, 9.6 mph * 11614 total hours on round trips amounts to 111492.959 miles.
NOTE: These estimates only include trips where the bike was returned. In other words, during the process of cleaning the data, all trips which had a end destination as NaN or end ID 3000 were excluded from the dataset. Otherwise, the statistics would be very skewed to the right.
The graph Bike Share Usage Since 07/07/2016 displays the total number of bikes used by each type of pass holder. T represents total. F represents flex pass holders. M represents monthly pass holders. W represents walk ups, and S represents Staff. From this graph we can deduce that monthly pass holders and walk ups make up the biggest demographic group in total bike share users and in total cyclical demand of bikes. As the number of bikes used by monthly users spikes, the number of walk ups jumps down and vice versa. This can further lead to the conclusion that there is an inverse relationship between the two groups. After further analyzing the data, it is clear that monthly users are commuters because their total usage is highest during the work week (Monday - Friday). On the other hand, walk ups are much more frequent during the weekends meaning that walk ups are very likely to be recreational users.
According to the boxplot of Bike Share Usage among Monthly Pass Holders, the median of total daily bike usage by monthly users is 300 bikes. If we deduct the fact that these pass holders have to commute to and from work, we get a total of around 150 clients. If we include the total amount of flex pass holders and staff, we can total our number of daily commuters to around 180 clients.
According to the bar chart of Total Bike Usage by the Hour, the most frequent time for bike usage is 6 pm. Total demand for a bike increases dramatically during that time period because people are trying to get home as fast as possible. If we assume that most commuters are monthly pass holders, a different bar chart appears. According to Bike Usage by Hour (Monthly Users), there are spikes at 9 am, 1 pm and 6 pm. This can be accounted for in morning rush hour, lunch, and evening rush hour. As mentioned in the paragraph describing popular start/end stations, in order to allocate bikes efficiently it is important to understand the trends are seen during an individual weekday. In short, in order to maximize allocative efficiency, bikes should be placed in the most popular starting stations for each segement of the day - morning, lunch, and evening rush hour. As mentioned before, these stations would be on Figueroa & Cesar Chavez in the morning, 3rd & San Pedro during lunch, and 7th & Flower for the evening.
After grouping together trips that have common passholder type, the following conclusions can be made. Monthly users are much more likely to take one way trips - 77099 one way trips vs. 3765 round trips. This furthers the argument that monthly users are commuters. Walk up users use one way trips far more often than round trips - 32322 one way trips vs. 8446 trips. Flex users are also more likely to use one way trips - 8981 one way trips vs. 483 round trips. Finally, staff are also more likely to be one way users - 286 one way trips vs. 80 round trips. Since one way trips are far more popular overall, Metro Bike Share could give discounts to those who want to make round trips so that profitablility in that route category can increase. As the demand increases, the amount of revenue generated will outweigh the total discounted price.
The most consistent and cyclical data comes from monthly clients and walk up clients. This can be in part explained by the fact that monthly users are commuters. The cyclicality can be explained by the work week. During the days monday-friday, many people are using bikes but this demand drops significantly during the weekends. On the other end of things, we can see that when the weekends come by, the number of walk-ups increases substaintially. This implies that monthly users are commuters (as mentioned), and walk-ups are people primarly recreational users. There are two very interesting spikes in usage from the our time series data. These dates are 2016-10-16 with 1477 bikes used and 2017-01-21 with 746. 2016-10-16 was national world food day and the L.A Dodgers were playing the Chicago Cubs in the second game of the NLCS; on 2017-01-21 there was a women's march in Los Angles. As the weather got cooler in L.A, demand for bikes declined. This can be shown by the steady decrease in bike usage as time progressed and a slight increase during the 200 to 250 days after 07/07/2016. Consumer demand is driven in line with the season of the year. In addition, as winter break came along - weeks between December 15 and January 15 - demand for bikes is at its lowest. This logistically makes sense because less people are coming to work and are vacationing. The peak for our data set was in the months of July - August. Factors that can explain why this is peak include the weather, the fact that people are vacationing less, and those months are particularly busy (plenty of internships and general work).