Finding a Citi Bike in New York City is not always easy. Is common to see stations with no bikes or no docks available. The only borough with stations in its total area is Manhattan, and Staten Island is not included in the system. And of course, that means that there are limits of where you are going to go in the city.

On November 15, 2023, The Comptroller’s Office of New York City published “Riding Forward: Overhauling Citi Bike’s Contract for Better, More Equitable Service”. They analyzed GBFS data provided by Citi Bike to evaluate bike and dock availability throughout the system.

This data provides a real-time picture of the number of bikes and docks at each station every 15 minutes. To identify spatial patterns in these data and concentrations of poor service, they used GIS to create maps of key indicators including bike availability, dock availability, and disabled bike status.

To search more about this topic, I used the Citi Bike API to identify the amount of bikes and ebikes available on a Monday morning, at 8 am.

The most common use of bicycles is on weekdays compared to the weekend, and it’s more challenging to find a bike from 7 to 9 a.m. because that’s when people move to work or school, for example. According to the data extracted from the Citi Bike API, on a Monday morning, it could be easier to find a regular bike instead of an electric bike. Lower Manhattan has more docks available than Queens, Bronx, and Brooklyn.

Some of the “Riding Forward report” key findigs was that “neighborhoods on the outer edges of the system experience far more unusable stations, disproportionately affecting Black, Latino, and low-income residents”, and that “riders in the Bronx experienced higher rates of unusable stations compared to other boroughs”.

The data provides a real-time picture of the number of bikes and docks at each station every 15 minutes. To identify spatial patterns in these data and concentrations of poor service, they used GIS to create maps of key indicators including bike availability, dock availability, and disabled bike status.

But one thing is to have bikes, and the other one is to have stations near you.