The Bike Share Map

Every pair of Metro Bike Share docks that has carried at least one ride since the system opened on 7 July 2016, drawn as one straight line. Brightness is the number of rides on that pair, so the corridors people actually use burn through and the once-in-a-decade trips stay as haze. There is no basemap: 2.58 million rides across 19,624 pairs of docks draw Los Angeles on their own. The orange rings are the rides that went nowhere and came back, which are the most common rides in the system.

All years
Draw pairs with
  

Rides on the pair

Round trips, back to the same dock
A dock

Four islands, not one network

Metro's own region column is a business label: it files 221 docks under "DTLA" across 26 kilometers of longitude, and reaches the coast. Grouping the docks by how far they actually are from each other gives the real shape, and riders behave as though the islands were separate systems. Click a row to fly to it.

IslandDocksRides inside it Share of the lines drawn

The runs that carry the system

The busiest pairs under the filters set above, with the split between the two directions and the two figures a straight line cannot give you: the modeled street distance from the routing layer, and the speed that distance implies against the observed median duration. The implied speeds are slow, and they are slow in the direction you would expect, which is the sanity check on the whole routing model.

PairRidesOne way The otherMedian Street kmImplied km/h

The rides that went nowhere

A ride that begins and ends at the same dock has no length and no direction, so it cannot be drawn as a line at all. These are not a rounding error. They are 574,929 rides, 18.2% of everything mappable, and the single most common thing anyone does on a Metro bike is one of them. A map made only of lines deletes all of it, which is why they are on the plate as rings.

DockRound tripsMedian ride Share of the dock's rides