The Lincoln Memorial has the highest percentage of “casual riders” – typically assumed to be tourists who rent on the fly – on Washington D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare system., at 82.3 percent.
We’ve never really had a view of how people are moving around the region on bicycle before CaBi came along and opened up its ridership data, allowing techie types to do cool analyses and visualizations of the ways people are traveling.
When transit agencies open their ridership data, techies and others can analyze it and tell stories that encourage people to ride their systems.
The above visualization shows the huge influx of people to D.C.’s Union Station in the mornings during July, August, and September of this year. The proportion of people with bikeshare accounts are represented with the blue lines. Casual riders are represented with red lines, and are part of an afternoon outflux.
Following the Lincoln Memorial, the largest percentage of casual riders use the stations at:
- MLK & FDR Memorials (81.2 percent)
- Jefferson Drive and 14th Street SW (80.8 percent)
- Smithsonian/Jefferson Drive and 12th Street SW (77.3 percent), and
- Jefferson Memorial (70.4 percent).
Related to the visualization of Union Station’s 41,190 trips, 16.9 percent were from casual riders and 83.1 percent were from registered riders. Of nearby 3rd & H’s 15,111 trips, 12.9 percent were from casual riders, 87.1 percent were from registered riders.
System-wide, 26 percent were from casual riders, and 74 percent were from registered riders.
Because of Capital Bikeshare’s open data and visualizations like this that tell a story, we are learning how our city is transforming and can envision ways to continue making it an even better place to live.
A version of this article was originally published at TedEytan.com, Every Body Walk!, Greater Greater Washington, and BeyondDC. Graphic by Michael Schade of Mobility Lab.