How the pandemic has changed the way we ride.
Since its first launch in May 2011 (originally called BIXI Toronto), Bike Share Toronto has really changes the way us city folks get around town. When I lived in Toronto, I opted for biking around city most of the time primarily because I couldn’t stand how congested the street cars and subways were during rush hour. I’m also not going to lie…I did love the feeling of weaving around streetcars knowing I was going to arrive at my destination sooner than those mechanical giants. And with no emissions! Now with the bike share program, everyone can enjoy all of it without any of the hassle that comes with owning your own bike.
The popularity of the bike share program is reflected in its rapid expansion throughout the city. Starting just in the downtown core, it has now extended to regions such as North York and Scarborough. At the end of every year, the program reaches new milestones in terms of the number of rides in a year. In December 2020, there were 2.9 million rides taken. This was the highest ridership in its 10 year history.
But how has the pandemic changed the way we use the bike share program? With many people transitioning to working from home and mandated lockdowns though the city, there were bounds to be implications for bike usage. We obtained access to the historical ridership data from the last 4 years from January 2017 to October 2020, and we aimed to explore how the ridership behavior has changes since March 2020 compared to previous years.
In our dataset, we had access to over 8.4 million trips. Of course, through the data cleaning process we had to remove some of the trips for which we had no origin and destination locations. We also removed outliers that seemed unrealistic. These include trips with a duration of less than 1 minute. Extreme outliers on the other end were removed using the inter-quartile range, leaving us with trips under 36.4 minutes. This made sense to us as the bike share program is typically supposed to be maximum of 30 minutes (without incurring penalty fees). Interesting to note, the long trip duration we found in the data set corresponded to 143 days. With the penalty fee that the City of Toronto charges, this is equivalent to $27,559. Ouch!
In the ridership dataset, there are two user types: casual and annual members. The annual members are the people who pay the pass fee upfront, and have unlimited access to 30-minute rides. On the other hand, casual members are those who opt to pay for the bike ride as they use. There were significant differences in the usage behavior between the two member types.
For annual members, there are distinct peaks in the morning and evening rush hour. On the other hand, for casual members, the demand is the highest towards the afternoon and peaks just around dinner time. Interestingly, these peaks during rush hour disappear when its the weekend or a statutory holiday. This reinforces our understanding that annual members frequently use the bikes for commuting while casual riders use it more for recreational purposes. Hence its popularity later in the day. It is good to know that most people in Toronto are not morning people.
Now, let’s look how how this usage has changed in 2020. As expected we see quite a change in 2020 due to the sudden need for most people to work from home. We see a reduction in peaks during the rush hour.
How has this changed for casual riders? Based on the hourly distribution, it doesn’t seem like it has changed the usage as significantly as it has impacted the annual members.
The usage by annual members was definitely impacted the most by COVID-19. When you look at the ratio of annual riders to casual riders in 2020, we definitely saw a huge drop. Although it is not to say this trend was also true for 2019 as well.
I think the most interesting result that came out of this analysis is when we looked at the rides specifically with the same start and end destination. If the origin and destination is the same for a trip, one can infer that this trip is solely recreational and used as a means to enjoy the bike ride and get some exercise in-between. In 2020, these types of bike trips increased significantly in number for both casual and annual members.
So it is all to say that the pandemic has not stopped the city folks from using the bike share service. In fact, the pandemic did not change the bike usage increase that we have continued to see since 2017, although it did introduce some fluctuations.
The bike share usage has definitely changed since the pandemic, mainly because people having been commuting less. This did not reduce the overall bike usage, however, because now people are using it for other reasons : getting out, enjoying the outdoors, getting some exercise. Thank god biking is a social-distance friendly activity!
Bike Share program has been a wonder addition to the city, changing the way how we get around and enjoy the city. And for this, we are thankful to the City for Toronto for their continually support for the program. We can’t wait to see how the program continues to change Toronto for the better.
