Citibike beating Barclays Cycle Hire

NYC Citibike’s meteoric rise continues – for October, the New York City bikeshare beat London’s Barclays Cycle Hire on average journeys per day, for both weekdays and weekends. Even more impressive considering that it’s only just over half the size.

Thanks to this release published today at the London Data Store, and this daily updating data from New York, I’ve been able to plot month-by-month figures, for the last three years for the Barclays Cycle Hire, and the last few months for Citibike, on the same graph. I’ve split out weekdays and weekends. Grey/black is New York City’s Citibike, while the colours (red, orange, green, blue) are the Barclays Cycle Hire for 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 respectively.

Click for the large version.

What’s even more impressive is that Citibike is currently physically smaller than London’s Barclays Cycle Hire. It currently has 330 docking stations and 4500 bikes, while London has 558 docking stations and 7600 bikes. These numbers don’t match exactly with official numbers, as I combine a small number of adjacent docking stations, and don’t count bikes in repair or otherwise unavailable for use.

London’s more temperature climate (a “warm/cool” city) means it should have a lead on NYC (a “hot/cold” city) in the summer and winter, while NYC may well be strongest in the spring and autumn.

Apologies for the rather lame looking graph. Excel crashed as I was setting it up, I sneaked a screenshot as the crash reporter popped up, but had to add the NYC data in manually in GraphicConverter…