If you use Capital Bikeshare in Arlington, Va., you likely have an idea of which stations are the busiest. And if you guessed those closest to Metro stations, you’re right.Bikeshare usage in Arlington closely tracks Metro corridors, but other patterns of use are also developing as the system expands.
But the beauty of examining data and creating visual representations of that data is that it often reveals less obvious patterns, including usage patterns beyond the bustling bikeshare stations along the Metro corridors.
The map below shows usage from a single month, September 2015 – a typical month for the busier summer season. In Arlington, riders took more than 28,000 trips over that period, while the system as a whole throughout the Washington, D.C., region saw 328,000.
September usage map. Click to enlarge.
The most-used stations continue to be those along the Metro corridors – the Orange and Silver lines in North Arlington and Blue and Yellow lines in South Arlington. In fact, of the 11 busiest bikeshare stations in Arlington, seven are at Metro stations and another two, both in Rosslyn, are within a few hundred meters of Metro. The remaining two are quite close as well: at the Iwo Jima Memorial, just south of Rosslyn, and at Crystal & 15th streets, in Crystal City.
All of these 11 stations saw at least 1,200 trips in September, a figure that includes trips that began or ended at the station. That equates to at least 40 trips per day, with the busiest (at Lynn & 19th streets, near the Rosslyn Metro), experiencing more than 130 trips per day.
These figures highlight the usefulness of bikeshare in Arlington’s denser neighborhoods that have good bike facilities, such as bike lanes and protected bike lanes. The numbers also reflect the fact that many bikeshare riders use the service as a first-mile/last-mile connection to other modes of transit.
Looking beyond the Metro corridors, though, other patterns also can be seen:
- North of the Rosslyn and Courthouse stations, a growing string of well-used bikeshare stations extends along Lee Highway, with many of these trips connecting to Metro.
- Similar strands of heavier use extend south of Ballston and Courthouse.
- Usage along Columbia Pike is distinctly lower, but can rise with continued improvements to the “bicycle boulevards” – low-stress neighborhood streets optimized for people walking and biking – that parallel the Pike on 9th Street South and 12th Street South.
This is a static picture, but bikeshare in Arlington is a growing and evolving network. The first few years of system growth took place along the Metro corridors. More recently, the focus has been on extending the bikeshare network into less dense parts of the county, such as neighborhoods along Columbia Pike and Arlington Boulevard. It will take time to fully build out the network in these areas and better connect to the network in the Metro corridors.
Map of proposed station locations. Click for the interactive version.
What will be interesting to see is how usage patterns change as new stations are added. In the next year, Arlington County is set to add several stations along Washington Boulevard from Ballston to the East Falls Church Metro, as well as stations along Lee Highway, Columbia Pike, and the Mount Vernon Trail. As the system expands, we’ll see what new patterns emerge.
Photo: A woman takes the last bikeshare bike at the busy Ballston Metro Capital Bikeshare station (Sam Kittner/kittner.com for Mobility Lab).