Abstract – We analyzed Citibike ridership by gender, investigating whether a greater percentage of males relative to females use the bikes when it’s dark outside. It has been well documented that men use the service more than women, but we particularly wanted to see if this ratio was exacerbated during non-daylight hours. Using data from June 2016, we organized and plotted data, and ran a unpaired t-test to compare the results. Ultimately we are able to conclude that the relative proportion of male riders does increase after dark, at least with regards for the timeframe we observed.
Introduction – The investigation of ridership by gender before and after normal daylight hours is interesting in that it touches on the culturally embedded notion that it’s more dangerous for women to be alone after dark than men. This may be true for numerous reasons, which we will not delve further into at present. However, it is possible that Citibike provides a safer alternative for nighttime travel, as riders more faster and have less human-interaction than walkers. In this instance, there do seem to be reasons that women would be more likely to ride after dark than men. Before looking at the data, then, it does seem like there are multiple possible outcomes, all of which tell us a little bit about how people perceive and use Citibike for transportation.
Data – We are using data provided by Citibike’s website, covering the month of June 2016. From this data, we transformed start and stop times for individual rides, found their means, and used these means to approximate whether a ride took place during ‘light’ or ‘dark’ hours. We defined ‘light’ as 7am-7pm for middle of the trip, and ‘dark’ as 7pm-7am for the middle of the trip. We chose to take the middle time of the trip, as, for example, someone starting a ride at 6:50am and riding to 7:40am would be spending more time riding in daylight hours, but would be counted as ‘dark’ using the start time, and similarly someone starting just before 7pm and peddling for well after would be considered ‘light’ when most of their time was spent peddling in the dark. Finding the middle time eliminates this issue in most instances, giving an indication whether most of the trip took place in one category or other, and classifying it in this manner.