Analysis:

Stations Location:

What are the most popular start/end station locations, since 2016?

• The most popular start stations in New York are shown in the Overall total trips graph, which depicts the top starting stations. After evaluating top locations, I noticed the most popular stations are located near train stations and parks in downtown Jersey City. This information can provide insight for Citi Bike on where to allocate bike placement and target marketing.
• The five most popular end stations in New York are the same as the top five start stations, but from the map we can see there are customers that ride into the city of New York and end their ride. The number of rides ending in New York has increased since 2016, as seen in the map depicting the end station in 2020.

• 'Grove St PATH' is the top overall start and end station for bikers. In 2020, we see Newport Pkwy become the top-visited station (start and end). This station is located near the bridge that accesses New York City. The popularity of this station could be increasing because more people are riding into New York, rather than around Jersey City.

  Other Trends?

• The map depicting the popularity of start stations provides insight to me and Citi Bike, as they can best plan bike placement and target marketing.

Number/Duration of Rides:

What age group has the largest number of total rides? Changing by year?

• Given the total rides overall graph, we see that age 31 has the largest number of rides with 54,380 rides.
• Ages 26-40 are the most frequent users of Citi Bikes, with 31-34 being the greatest out of the range.
• From the moving bar chart, we can see that in 2016 the number of rides by age was fairly spread out, between the ages of 26-50. As the chart progresses through 2018 into 2019, we see the age range 26-40 increase at a larger rate than others.
• Between the years 2016-2020, the median age decreased from 39-36. This phenomenon tells us Citi bikes are becoming more popular for younger ages and less popular for older ages.
• An interesting trend in the data I found was in 2020, where we see our largest proportion of users below age 33. I hypothesize this could be due to Covid-19 and a mixture of stay at home orders, increasing sales of machines like Peloton, and schools shutting down. Teenagers need something to do!

• Outlier: age 51 recorded the largest number of riders in 2020. Not sure why?!

  What age group has the longest average ride time? Changing by year?

• Ages 26-40 ride more often, but ages 16-25 ride a lot longer.

• An interesting statistic is in 2016 with age 72 having the largest average ride time. Not sure why this is, but wanted to address it. Overall, age 72 and 78 had among the largest average ride time.

  What is happening to the number of rides VS average ride time, since 2016?

• From the graph depicting 'Number of Trips VS Average Duration of Trips' we clearly see that the total number of trips taken has decreased sharply and at the same time the average trip duration has increased rapidly..

• This visual implies that users are taking fewer trips but riding longer. With support from the Popular End Station's map, where we can see more users riding further into New York City, we can infer riders are making more of their ride, rather than just getting somewhere.

  Female target marketing:

• In recent years, Citi Bike has implemented target marketing campaigns where they aim to increase female users. As shown in both moving visuals in this section, we see that there has been an increase in the percentage of female users. From 2016-2020 the ratio of rides by females has increased from 22.5% to 31.8%. This equates to a ~58% increase in the total number of rides by female users between 2016-2020.

• An interesting trend I spotted was since Covid-19 began, the number of rides by males decreased ~30% while females only decreased 3%!

  "Unknown" outliers

• As shown in the visual section called "Gender data outlier," the dataset contains rows of data with gender="unknown." There could be many implications for this, one being gender is not binary, but most of the data with "unknown" gender also has the birth year of 1969. I imagine these are both default placeholders when a user rents a bike.

• With the majority of "Unknown" genders sharing the birth year of 1969, I decided to not include the data when doing an analysis of gender and age.

User Type:

What proportion of trips by users were customers vs subscribers? Is this changing by year?

• In 2016, ~6.9% of trips were by user type customer and ~93.1% were subscribers.
• From 2016-2019, the ratio changed to ~13.3% of users were customers and ~86.7% were subscribers, respectively.
  
  
• Although the total number of trips by users increased by 94,710 between 2016-2019, the number of subscriber trips decreased by ~6.4%.
  • This change is significant, given the short period of time and considering Citi Bike has only been around since 2013. This analysis shows users are moving away from subscriptions to paying per trip.
  • In order to identify if this is affecting revenue, we would need to see income statements broken up by user type. If sales are dropping due to users migrating toward pay per trip, then Citi Bike should be concerned and strategize how to increase subscribers.
    
    
• In 2020, the ratio of customers increasing to ~39% and subscribers decreasing to ~61%.
  • This unexpected phenomenon is most likely due to Covid-19. My interpretation is that users that our subscribers are the majority of workers in Jersey City that use Citi Bikes for commuting daily. Due to Covid-19, workers weren't going to work, but rather working from home.
  • Total trips decreased by ~12.2%, while the number of trips by subscribers decreased ~38%, the number of trips by customers increased 250%!

What age groups are primarily subscribers or customers? Is this changing by year?

• From the moving bar chart, we can clearly see the increase in customers to subscribers ratio.
• From the graph, we can also see a slight movement to younger ages accounting for more trips using Citi Bikes.
• In 2016, virtually no users were under the age of 27. As the graph move to 2020, we see a huge increase in the number of trips by riders under the age of 27.
• From the User Type by Age graph, in 2020 we see a significant increase in customer trips vs subscribers and a large increase in younger users.
  • This analysis tells the story of user types changing since 2016 and how Covid-19 has impacted user type and age demographics for each ride counted.

Possible Citi Bike Strategies

• Citi Bike can utilize my analysis to strategize and make decisions to survive in 2020's unprecedented times. While the overall number of riders did not decrease as significantly as one might expect, there has been a large transition in user type and age demographic.
• This is concerning if it is affecting revenue. Citi Bike does not want this to be a trend in the future, especially with work at home fading and the older demographic trips increasing again.