TWO GREAT TASTES IN ONE CANDY BAR

A Half-Baked Idea About How We CanRedesign New York Around Citi Bike

Dr. Anthony Townsend NYU Rudin Center

for Transportation Policy and Management

Trips That :• Are Too Far to Walk ~ 1 mile• Span Gaps in Transit• On Heavily Congested Bus Routes (the f***ing M42)• Between Spokes on the Wheel• Beyond Your Comfort Zone?

Citi Bike’s killer apps:niches in NYC’s transportation system

Now, When Foursquare Dares You to Explore…

Hop on a Citi Bike!

Win Points and Badges!Grow Your Heat Map!

B.F.D.

What If We Re-Design A Neighborhood Around These New Tools

How?1. Mine entire Foursquare check-in database to figure out what

anchors/attractors entice people out from subway stations2. Now you can move those out further because you have Citi

Bike3. Use incentives to move those anchors further out4. Allows you to spread the enormous value of the subway over a

larger area5. Increase density in that larger area6. BOOM! With no public money spend, you’ve solved New York’s

biggest long-term problem: where do we put the next 1 million New Yorkers!

6

How Can We Test This?

• Look at how mobility patterns evolve for a group of subjects by looking at personal data for both systems– A) as they learn to use Foursquare– B) as they learn to use citibike– C) as they learn to use the two together

• Do their heat maps grow? Can we leverage that to increase the “ridership shed” of a transit stop?

• Maybe one day… mash both entire data sets together