Bicycles On East River Bridges

Source: https://data.world/city-of-ny/gua4-p9wg.
Analysis: R (openxlsx, plyr, dplyr, magrittr, lubridate).
Visualization: D3 (Kendo UI style).

Bridges of New York are essential details of the city. When we saw a dataset about bicycles crossing East River Bridges every day, we couldn’t walk past.

Brooklyn Bridge is a hybrid cable-stayed/suspension bridge connecting the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. It carries vehicular, pedestrian and bicycle traffic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Bridge).

Manhattan Bridge is a suspension bridge that crosses the East River connecting Lower Manhattan with Downtown Brooklyn. It carries lanes of roadway, tracks of the subway trains and bicycles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Bridge).

Williamsburg Bridge is a suspension bridge across the East River connecting the Lower East Side of Manhattan with the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. It carries lanes of roadway, tracks of the subway trains, pedestrians and bicycles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamsburg_Bridge).

Queensboro Bridge (also known as the 59th Street Bridge) is a cantilever bridge over the East River connecting the neighborhood of Long Island City in the borough of Queens with the neighborhood of Upper East Side in Manhattan. It carries vehicular traffic and 1 lane for pedestrians and bicycles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queensboro_Bridge).

The most comfortable season for bicycles is from April till October because the average temperature is higher than 10 degrees Celsius. In the dataset I have bicycle counts that crossed the bridges since April 2017 till October 2017 daily.

On the first three diagrams you can see how many bicycles crossed the bridges in the spring, in the summer and in the autumn.

The most active days for bicyclist are Thursday and Friday during summer. The day with the biggest number of bicycles is July 26th (26,969 bicycles). And the day when the most bicyclist left their bicycle at home is May 13rd (2,374 bicycles). If we look at temperature of these days, we will see maximum is 25 degrees Celsius and minimum is 19 degrees Celsius in July 26th. It’s pretty comfortable temperature to ride a bicycle.

Let’s check May 13rd.. Maximum is 11 degrees and minimum is 7 degrees. So the first thought is bicyclists in NY prefer warm conditions to ride bicycle. But let’s check records with minimum temperature less or equal 7 degrees.. There are 11 days with the same minimum temperature. So temperature isn’t only reason to leave bicycle at home..

Let’s check precipitation.. yooohoo.. May 13rd is the most raining day among other 10 days with the same temperature conditions. So NY bicyclists can’t leave out of account weather conditions.

Which bridge is the most popular among bicycles since April till October?

1,295,055 bicycles crossed the Williamsburg bridge in 2017 that made it the most popular bridge.

The Brooklyn bridge was the most unpopular bridge among bicyclists in 2017. Only 573,529 bicycles crossed it. But why? It looks the most comfortable bridge for bicyclists.. with nice lane on upper level.. Maybe overcrowded by people.. Or maybe people who live in the neighborhoods close to the bridge don’t like riding bicycle.. Unfortunately, we don’t have information to research this question.