An Analysis of the Indego Bicycle Sharing System

Bike sharing programs have become increasingly popular throughout major cities. This has been due in part to lack of available street parking, increased traffic, and the cost of maintaining as well as securing a personal bicycle throughout a city.

These bike sharing programs can follow many different designs, but a common one involves removing a bicycle from one of many docking stations found throughout a city, using the bicycle for a period of time, and then returning it to another (or possibly the original) docking station.

One city which has implemented such a system is Philadelphia, PA. The name of the program is Indego. The company's website mentions:

The City of Philadelphia launched Indego in 2015 as the city’s newest form of public transportation. It’s simple – with over 1,000 self-service bikes and 130+ stations Indego offers 24/7 access to the City on your schedule.

This Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) project examines data related to all the bike rides involving Indego bikes from the second quarter of 2021 (April-June). This data is available for download on Indego's website https://www.rideindego.com/about/data/. The datasets are downloadable as zip files which also include a file containing the bike station names' ID codes. The data includes a number of useful information about the bike rides:

• The duration of each bike trip in minutes
• The date and time of each bike trip's start and end
• The name as well as the longitude and latitude of each bike trip's start and end station.
• The bike identification number
• The the bike plan duration- whether single day, monthly, or yearly
• The trip route category- whether "round trip" or "one way"
• The name of the passholder’s plan
• The bike type- whether a standard pedal-owered bike or and electric assist bike

The zip file is accessible through the webpage listed above or directly through the link:

https://u626n26h74f16ig1p3pt0f2g-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/indego-trips-2021-q2.zip

We can start by importing the necessary libraries.