Dublin Bikes Scheme

Introduction

The Dublin Bikes scheme is a public bike rental system, allowing customers to pick up and drop off bikes at docking stations in the city. There are 114 stations in the scheme with an estimated 1,411 bikes in total, based on analysis in February 2019.

The location of each station is shown on the map above. The name, number, latitude and longitude of each station can be displayed by clicking a marker on the map.

Data trends

Looking at the statistics for bike usage throughout a typical day reveals a pattern that reflects average working hours and peak commuting times. The graph below shows the variation in the total number of bikes available to rent, meaning bikes parked at a station and not in use, throughout the entire network on a typical weekday.

The fewest bikes are available around 9am when the largest number of concurrent users are likely finishing their morning commute and showing up for work. Between 6am and 9am there is a steady decrease in the number of bikes available while more and more users rent bikes for their morning commute.

Expanding the analysis to each time the data was scraped in the month of October shows the weekday pattern is consistently repeated. The five weekdays followed by weekends without the large dips in availability seen during the week can be seen in the graph below.

Each of the sections between the vertical gridlines of the above graph represent a calendar day. Dips in availability down to the 900 bikes level occur on weekday mornings. There is a second dip in availability each weekday evening which is not as low as morning. This matches a pattern of commuters arriving to work at close to the same time in the morning, and then gradually leaving work in the evening.

The number of bikes available on weekday evenings has a higher baseline than weekday afternoons, as would be expected. Bikes can only be rented from 5:00am to 12:30am. They can be returned 24 hours a day.

The pattern of availability at each individual station depends on the location. An example of a central station, where commuters arrive in the morning and leave in the evening, is shown in the graph below for Merrion Square South.

The number of bikes available at the station steadily increases after 6am until just before midday. This metric then stabilises around the 25 bike mark before commuters start to rent bikes from shortly before 5pm.

There is then a sharp decline in the number of bikes available until this stabilises at zero around 6pm. This shows how commuters who leave the office later tend to not have the option of renting a bike from this station.

The opposite pattern of availability and the inverse metric of the number of free stands at an individual station can be seen at stations located at the outskirts of the city centre.

An example of this is shown in the graph below for the station at Killarney street, near North Strand.

Here we see the number of bikes available steadily decline towards zero before 9am until there are none left for about half of the period between 9am and midday. The number of bikes available steadily increases from about 4pm as commuters return and park bikes at the stations until there are no free stands available to park bikes at around 7:30pm.

There is a sharp decline in the number of bikes available from just below 30 to 15 at around 8:30pm, indicating a manual intervention to free up bike stands and redistribute bikes. Many Dubliners will be familiar with the sight of small trucks being used to redistribute bikes manually in the city.

Alert parameters

Subscribers are able to change the values of the parameters used in the regular analysis of the data. This gives the subscriber full control of their alerts, which are raised when trends in the data change or exceed the thresholds set, possibly indicating newsworthy events.

To get access to alerts on real datasets or a demo of how subscribers can easily set their own parameters for data alerts use the contact button in the menu bar above.

Sources

Data is scraped from the Dublin Bikes API. It is published by Dublin City Council. Further details about the scheme itself is available at DublinBikes.ie. The data is provided by the original publisher under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, meaning it can be shared and adapted for commercial purposes.