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