Abstract
The purpose of this study is to explore whether females over age fifty is in better in physical conditions than their male counterparts by examining their usage of Citi Bike. The premise of the study is that more Citi Bike uses suggest better overall health conditions. This study finds that the proportion of female Citi Bike riders above age fifty is in fact lower than the pro
Introduction
The Citi Bike is a bike sharing project in New York City. The program allows users to simply self check out bikes at stations and return them to any stations after uses. It supposes to be an integral part of the New York City transportation system providing a sustainable and alternative way of commuting. Citi Bike generated tremendous potential to study urban problems for its temporal and spatial components in the dataset. This study suggests to particularly look at the Citi Bike as an instrument to gauge urban health status. Biking is not just a method of commuting but also can be treated as a form of physical exercise. This study is interested in whether differences in physical conditions of genders in certain age group can be inferred from the Citi Bike data.
Data
The data used for this study is provided by the open data from NYC provided by Citi Bike. The data from the month of June and December for year 2016 for this study. This choice is based on the intuition that the selection of one month each from both summer and winter season could control for some variations due to the weather conditions. Then dataset is further reduced by checking if one of the categories for gender or birth year has missing entry (NaN) and is deleted from the dataset. Then the bikers whose age is above fifty and also born after 1930 is selected to be the final dataset upon which analysis is performed. See Figure 1 for a snippet of the final dataset.