Aaron Gordon, who is a data reporter at Bloomberg News, has been working on his coding skills. And so for absolutely no reason whatsoever, he decided to map out the life of one of New York's Citi Bikes, specifically Citi Bike #32606. The dataset is pre-pandemic because Citi Bike stopped publishing unique bike identifiers for each trip around 2020. But based on historical data and far as we know, #32606 is the most-used traditional bike (i.e. not an e-bike) in the history of the Citi Bike network.
It began its life on October 15, 2017 at 11:08am in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and then went on to accomplish 7,060 miles (~11,361 kilometers) and 8,624 trips over a period of 806 days. This works out to an average of just over 10 trips per day. In total, this bike traveled the equivalent of a return trip from New York to Los Angeles, and then a short trip up to Burlington, Vermont. And it was all done with only leg power.
Here's the visual mapping that Aaron created:
What I love about this passion project is that it starts to show just how impactful something as simple as a single shared bicycle can be for a city. These bike networks are relatively new, but they're already doing a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to urban mobility. Earlier this week, we learned that in the City of London, cyclists now make up 2x the number of people in cars. And that of the people cycling, 17% of them do so using a shared bicycle.
In the case of New York, the Citi Bike network had ~128,000 active members and ~34,000 bikes as of February 2025. What you're seeing above is the story of just one them.
Cover photo by Spenser Sembrat on Unsplash
According to the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), scooter trips in the US surpassed station-based bike share trips for the first time in 2018. Here is a chart taken from Streetsblog:
Dockless electric scooters have created a public nuisance in many of our cities, but what is clear is that the demand is there. Which perhaps isn't all that surprising given that they require less effort than traditional cycling.
The other interesting takeaway from NACTO's analysis, which is likely also not that surprising, is that bike share trips are heavily concentrated in a select few cities.
In 2018, there were about 36.5 million bike share trips across the US. And about 84% of them took place in just 6 cities: New York, Boston, Chicago, DC, Honolulu, and San Francisco.
Almost half of the 36.5 million trips were on NYC's Citi Bike network.
When I was in Miami at the beginning of this month I missed an interesting event that I normally would have attended. It was a conversation between the Chief Planner of Toronto, Jennifer Keesmaat, and the former commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation, Janette Sadik-Khan.
Sadik-Khan was appointed under the Bloomberg administration and quite famously oversaw a huge number of urban changes in New York. Projects such as the addition of hundreds of kilometers of new bike lanes and the creation of 60 new pedestrian plazas across the city – including the one in Times Square.
I was bummed I couldn’t attend, but thankfully Keesmaat wrote a post on her blog following the event and the Metcalf Foundation shared videos of the conversation.
Here’s a piece that I liked from Keesmaat’s blog post:
“But she also pointed out that when they demonstrated what could be done, when they quickly mobilized around action, residents clamoured for similar changes in their neighbourhoods. Not surprisingly, this is why her book is called Streetfight – because it is a fight. City building is often the battle of ideologies, and when you’re trying to change the status quo, there is always a significant demographic of the population that is fully committed to maintaining business-as-usual.”
If you have some time, you can also click here to watch the videos. There’s about an hour and a half worth of video, so you might want to open up a bottle of wine or something.