Here are the daily usage patterns for every Indego bike share station

Jon Geeting

September 8, 2015

Indego bike station usage patterns — (Randy Olson)

Since Indego first rolled out last spring, we’ve been intensely interested in the questions around how Philadelphians are using the new bike share service: how fast it’s growing compared to our peer cities, how popular it is in different parts of the city, and what it all means for the future of land use and transportation planning here.

Those of you who share this interest would do well to bookmark Randy Olson’s blog. Olson, a post-doctoral researcher at Penn, has been doing some quality analysis of the early numbers aimed at assessing the health of the different Indego stations, and there are lots of fascinating visualizations to peruse over there.

This week he’s out with a new infographic visualizing usage patterns at each station.

From my previous attempt, we already know that there are clear cyclical usage patterns for many of the Indego stations: Stations in residential areas tend to empty out in the mornings and refill in the evenings, whereas stations in the business sectors do the opposite. In addition to that information, I also wanted to communicate the health of the bike stations, i.e., how often the stations are full or empty of bikes […]

Each sub-graph corresponds to an active Indego station, showing the average performance from morning (left) through the evening (right). The y-axis represents the percentage of time the station is full, empty, or somewhere in between during the corresponding hour. Darker reds represent fuller stations, whereas darker blues represent emptier stations.

Olson recommends Indego riders use this chart to make educated guesses about where they’ll stand the best chance of successfully picking up or returning a bike at different points in the day.

Check out the site for some additional station-level analysis and insights, and tell us in the comments if this jibes with your experience with these stations. Do any daily riders have experience with stations that seem either full or empty most of the time?

(h/t Chris Cummins)

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