Cycling in Paris during the strike 🚲
A strike has been taking place in Paris since the 5th of December 2019. As of 12th January, it has been longer than a month that the strike has brought major revisions in Parisians’ daily routine. While more than 30 unions are engaged against the reform in the pension system in France, in this article I explore the role of strike in Parisians’ daily transportation habits. More specifically I concentrate on cycling trends during the strike period in Paris.
Data Collection
As soon as I had the idea of writing this article, I googled for cycling data in Paris. I then gladly discovered that the dataset on cycling is publicly available in the Paris Data platform since 2018. Data simply contains the number of cyclists on hourly brackets from 60 different locations. Unfortunately, it is not possible to obtain the unique number of cyclists out of data since multiple counters in a single cyclist route will cause duplication in the statistics.
Even though the number of cyclists is not unique, comparison on data with the previous intervals will be helpful to uncover variation. While comparing data, I focus on two-dimension:
- Month-over-Month (MoM): What was the number of cyclists exactly 4 weeks ago the same day. (e.g. 2019–12–05 vs. 2019–11–07),
- Year-over-Year (YoY): What was the number of cyclists exactly 1 year ago the same day. (e.g. 2019–12–05 vs. 2018–12–05).
The dataset is licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL). R code for data processing and visualization for preparing this article is publicly available in my GitHub repository.
Daily cycling trend during the strike
The very first day that strike has started, biking has tripled compared to the year before (YoY: %298) and increased 105% comparing to last month.
Overall, as of 2020–01–12, biking as increased 333% YoY and this varies depending on the week of the day:
- During weekdays: +362% YoY
- During weekends: +248% YoY
I suppose Parisians now prefer cycling while going to work. They’d rather stay home during the weekend and if they need to go out anyway, they prefer taking their bikes or Velib.
In the following chart, we see the total number of daily cyclists as well as numbers from the year before and the month before. As highlighted, during the weekends, bike usage is relatively less than the weekdays.
Hourly cycling trend
The second thing I wanted to take a look at was the hourly distribution of cycling during the strike. Recalling my previous assumption, I was expecting to see a significant increase in bike usage during peak hours on weekdays.
As seen in the following diagram, there are many more bikers from 8 am to 10 am and from 5 pm to 7 pm on weekdays. On contrary during the weekends, we see more balanced bike usage starting slowly during the morning, increasing gradually till evening then going back to normal.
When I dive into details, I see that during the weekday peak hours, bike usage increased between 310% and 340% comparing to the last year. Surprisingly, during the weekday, the biggest jump on cycling is between 6 am to 7 am and almost 430%. During the weekend, the biggest increase occurs during the afternoon from 4 pm to 8 pm around ~425%.
When we look at data per day, we see that cycling distribution is quite stable during the weekdays e.g. not much difference from Monday to Friday. I also notice similar trends on Saturday and Sunday. Nevertheless, there is only an exception on Friday and Saturday late nights. As we can recognize in the daily chart as well, cycling remains higher during Friday and Saturday late night providing up to 400% increase comparing to the precedent year while cycling increase is nearly 200% during other days the same hours.
Key points in bike traffic
Ultimately, I craved emphasizing bike traffic on the Paris map to detect the cyclists’ density. This is moderately tricky to achieve considering the cyclist counters are not uniformly distributed in Paris. That is why the following visualization is based on the maximum number of cyclists if there are two or more counters close-by. Another issue we easily notice on the map is that counters are not installed everywhere in Paris yet, meaning that we don’t know about bike usage, especially 17th, 18th and 20th districts.
As highlighted in red on the map, we easily notice that Châtelet–Les Halles area is the busiest point for cyclists. This area is also on my daily bike route and I can say that it is not surprising to see that it is the most lively cycling hub.
The counters with the highest number of cyclists are Rue Rivoli at the 4th district and 48 quai de la marne at the 19th district. On an average day, they were on the route of more than 6K cyclists during the strike. On the other hand, Porte D’Orléans at the 14th district is the idlest point with only ~230 daily cyclists.
Conclusion
Day by day, public transportation is getting back to the normal following pension reform strike in Paris. I took a closer look at what difference the strike made on cycling in Paris. We see a clear growth in cycling during the rush hours on weekdays and late hours on the weekend nights. The key point for cycling is Châtelet–Les Halles as it is located very centrally.
