THE VALUE OF HUBWAY

One of Hubway's significant advantages over other transportation service providers is the effectively zero marginal cost for every ride. We wanted to compare the value of each Hubway trip to a similar Uber trip and identify the areas where Hubway users generate the most value. Using the Uber API and latitude and longitude coordinates for every Hubway station, we were able to pull Uber cost and trip time data between each start and end station pair (referred to as a route) in 2016. Specifically, we used the Uber X "High Estimate" for cost and Uber X "Duration" for trip time. For Hubway's trip time, we used the bicycling trip time from the Google Maps API, to be consistent.

Uber's Trip Time Advantage

While each Hubway trip is obviously cheaper than an Uber journey on a marginal cost basis, Uber holds the trip time advantage for the vast majoity of routes on the system.

Hubway vs. Uber Trip Time Delta - 2016 Routes

Hubway's Value Advantage

So if Hubway is superior in terms of cost and Uber is superior in terms of trip time, which service provider gives riders the most value? To figure this out, we decided to assign a monetary value to each minute of trip time saved or lost. As the chart below shows, even at a value of $3.40 per minute (which would put someone in the top 1% of the United States in terms of income), Hubway provides more value than Uber for more than 50% of all 2016 Hubway trips taken. At Uber's own current cost per minute for rides in the Boston area (20 cents per minute), Hubway provides more value for all trips.

Proportion of Hubway Routes / Trips with Greater Value than Uber - 2016

Visualizing Hubway vs. Uber

We wanted to visualize the actual routes and their value deltas over time, so we created the animated maps for Hubway trips taken on Tuesday, August 9, 2016, the busiest day of the year for Hubway in 2016 in terms of trips taken. Routing and trip time information for bicycling were taken from the Google Maps API. Driving trip times were also taken from the Google Maps API to account for traffic at different times of the day (the Uber API does not allow you to request trip times for a specific time of day).

You can specify the cost per minute to use by sliding the bar, with green routes indicating superior Hubway value and yellow routes indicating superior Uber value. As the cost per minute increases, you should see more yellow routes.

Note: If you do not see anything on the maps, please be sure to enable scripts on your browser (Chrome should display a little icon with a red "x" on the far right of the address bar)

Hubway Trips - August 9, 2016 | Uber Value Differential

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The following map displays the same routes as the previous one, but aggregates the routes over time, giving a complete picture of all routes taken for that point in time (be sure to click play).

Cumulative Hubway Trips - August 9, 2016 | Uber Value Differential

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Visualizing Hubway vs. Transit

We also compared Hubway trips to transit trips, assuming a cost of $2.25 for each transit trip and getting trip time from Google Maps API. Hubway is generally faster than transit (at least from Hubway station to Hubway station), so cost per minute actually increases Hubway's value relative to transit (be sure to click play).

Hubway Trips - August 9, 2016 | Transit Value Differential

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Cumulative Hubway Trips - August 9, 2016 | Transit Value Differential

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Cost per Minute Control
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Resources

CartoDB's Torque functionality was used to produce the animated maps. Todd Schneider's analysis of Citi Bike in New York City provided the initial inspiration for our analysis. All code is available on GitHub.