Note: I’ll be putting up charts and graphs about Nice Ride all week long, as part of our ongoing Crowdsource Bike Share Planning efforts. If you’d like to participate in this project, and earn a free Nice Ride membership and some Nice Ride MN swag. If interested, please email me at [email protected] and/or read this post.
Here’s a chart from the presentation by planning consultant Antonio Rosell during last week’s Nice Ride Crowdsource Kickoff, showing system usage over the past five years.
Here are the cumulative numbers:
As you can see, there’s a steady pattern of trips growing throughout the summer season. It’s what you’d expect.
Data from Nice Ride’s 5-year Assessment.
But there’s one interesting detail about this chart. For the first few years, the growth in system usage was matched by a corresponding growth in the number of Nice Ride stations. But the last year, due to a change in the bicycle vendor, Nice Ride didn’t add any new stations to its system.
Despite that, bike share usage continued to grow, adding almost 100,000 new trips.
So, here’s the mystery: What explains the increasing usage in spite of the static number of stations?
That’s a great question, and you should go ahead and answer it yourself. Feel free to dig into the Nice Ride data and explore a bit.
Any theories? If you wanted to add 100,000 new trips next year, what lessons could you draw from these numbers?