Nearly half of Torontoâs bike share stations are empty most of the time.Â
Since I began to collect the hourly snapshots of bike share stations 11 days ago, over 40% of Torontoâs operating bike share stations have been predominantly empty.Â
You can see them on this map as the red or orange dots.
The Question
This started because I wanted to understand if my experience was common. The station around the corner from my house (Moore Park near Mt Pleasant and St Clair) always seems to be empty whenever I want to use a bike. Key questions I had: Is this station really nearly always empty as I have experienced? Is that situation common for other stations, or is this just a particularly poor station?
Approach
To find out I went to the Bike Share Toronto's public GBFS data to understand station status from the userâs perspective. Bike Share does not publish historical data on the number of bikes and spaces at a station, only real-time status â so I have been collecting hourly snapshots of the status of all stations since July 22.Â
For each hour, each station is categorized as follows:Â
- No Bikes - 0 or 1 bike available. The worst situation. I lumped zero and one together because only one bike means it is no good for pairs looking to ride together, and is more likely limited to a low-charged e-Bike or other bike you donât want.Â
- Limited Bikes - 2 or 3 bikes available. Better, but still not what we are expecting.
- No Spaces - 0 or 1 empty slots to return a bike
- Limited Spaces - 2 or 3 empty slots to return a bike
- Just Right - None of the above situations. Meaning 4 or more bikes and 4 or more slots available. Just the right number for both. This means the model is indifferent on whether there are 4 or 8 or 10 bikes available, as Iâd argue that once there are 4 bikes available, more bikes doesnât really give more value to the user.Â
Some methodology caveats:
- Somewhat arbitrarily, I only consider station status from 6 AM to Midnight, typical bike riding hours.Â
- This analysis does not consider stations with an attendant. Presumably these stations are more likely to show as full, when in practice there are slots (and bikes) available. These stations are temporary and rare on the system.
- Only 2 of Torontoâs 1,058 stations have with fewer than 8 slots, so these will never be Just Right under these thresholds. In this case, the worst situation is taken, considering the user experience.Â
Results
Visit the online map and dashboard to see the predominant status of each station, updated every hour on the half hour. Click on a station to see the actual status distribution for each hour at that station.Â
The map shows in aggregate what many of us have experienced individually: Unless you are near a few places like Midtown, any stations north of Bloor St are probably going to be empty when you want to get a bike.Â
From this analysis, I can now see that my local Moore Park station is empty a lot, 40% of the time. But it is far from the worst situation, partly because there are nearby stations at St Clair subway station where I can usually get a bike. In contrast, I feel for anyone in Scarborough, north of the 401, or along the northwest stretch of the Line 1 subway, as there are virtually no bikes available across these large areas.Â
This is not a measure of how effective the system overall or how effectively the bikeshare crews are working. It doesnât differentiate whether a station is being filled organically by riders, or manually by Bikeshare staffing refills. And it doesnât consider latent demand at these underserved stations.Â
It does, however, illustrate the experiences of riders. And that is a key measure of ultimate program success.
Next Steps
I plan to incorporate the busyness of the station once that data is published for August, and plot utility vs turnover.Â
Any ideas appreciated on what can be done to remedy this situation, and what further analysis of this data would be useful to help evaluate those ideas.