NYC Bike Stats

&gt; Don’t bike on the sidewalk. Seriously.<p>A prevalence of biking on the sidewalk in an area is a signal to designers that cyclists feel it is too dangerous to bike on the road amongst traffic. It means that a protected bike lane needs to be built.

&gt; Let me just start by saying that there is no good reason not to wear a helmet when riding a bike in NYC.<p>One common argument is that drivers have more respect for cyclists without helmets, i.e. they&#x27;re more afraid of hitting a cyclist without a helmet.<p>The discussion goes back a long time, this article for instance is 9.5 years old: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;strange-but-true-helmets-attract-cars-to-cyclists&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scientificamerican.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;strange-but-true-...</a><p>I guess, most cyclists think it&#x27;s more likely that they&#x27;ll be hit by a car, not a pedestrian.<p>It could also be that some cyclists don&#x27;t have the money to buy a helmet - or other types of safety gear.

It&#x27;s hilarious that you would interrupt a blog post on analyzing a data dump for a sermon on helmets that is not remotely supported by the empirical data.<p>Cyclists die in traffic because they are hit by multi-ton motorized vehicles, not any of the things enumerated here.

Is it just me or are line charts with fills harder to interpret while not adding any value over normal line charts? Instead they add ambiguity because while the surface itself doesn&#x27;t seem to mean anything (?), it does have two bounding lines and depending on the graph only the upper or lower bound is the line which contains actual data - the other one is the line with the data from one of the other data sets. At least that what I make out of it but maybe I&#x27;m completely wrong?<p>E.g. take the first graph: the red surface starts at 0 and the upper bound is the actual &#x27;overall ridership&#x27; for Second Avenue, right? (note to author: even when the units seem obvious to you, they might not actually be obvious for everyone). So the lower bound of the green surface (Lafayette Street) has the same shape as the data for Second Avenue. Why? What does that mean? It&#x27;s just the upper bound of the green surface which is the actual data for Lafayette street, no?<p>On topic: glad to see bicycle usage is rising, but would be interesting to see if e.g. car usage is declining and how the total number of people on the road is changing.

Also interesting to see the breakdown of usage of the Citi bikes. Does increased usage of Citi bikes lead more casual users who don&#x27;t wear helmets?

Interesting analysis. After ten years, I wonder whether the authors&#x27; choice of sampling intersections should be updated as new bike lanes make certain routes more preferable. For example: There&#x27;s a heavily-used bike lane on 9th Street which is on the official NYC bike map; 7th street has no marked lane and doesn&#x27;t get as many riders in my experience.

The article says they do the survey on a particular day each year whereas the data set is less specific on that fact. Surely they do the survey over multiple days...? If available, there must be a ton of citibike usage data one could use to verify the citibike stats collected by this survey and generally validate this data a bit.

Nice analysis but Excel default color schemes are unbearable. I wonder how many people their hideousness turns away before even contemplating the data.