Where Boston can't walk to a Bluebike
Boston has 324 Bluebikes stations, and 21 square miles of the city are still more than a five-minute walk from one. The map names every gap by neighborhood.
Dana's question was really 'which neighborhood first', and NeuraCities answered it with a named, measured gap for every neighborhood in the city.
How it got to 21 square miles
Three layers from Analyze Boston and the city's GIS portal, and one chain of operations:
- The 572 Bluebikes stations in the system, 324 of them inside Boston, the city boundary, and the 26 neighborhood polygons.
- Every station got a 400 meter buffer, a five-minute walk. The buffers were erased from the city boundary, and what was left was split by neighborhood and measured.
- The gaps are drawn on the map and charted as a share of each neighborhood. West Roxbury: 4.7 square miles, 85 percent of the neighborhood. Hyde Park: 3.5 square miles, 78 percent. East Boston: 2.9 square miles, 62 percent. Downtown, Back Bay and the South End: under 0.05 square miles each.
What to ask next
A gap is land, not people. Franklin Park and the Arnold Arboretum account for much of Jamaica Plain's 1.6 square miles, and the East Boston gap includes the airport. Ask the conversation to remove parks, airports and water, or to overlay population and car ownership, and Mattapan's 1.0 square miles moves up the list. The answer changes; the minute it takes does not.
Boston Bluebikes Walk Gaps
Everything above is this conversation. Open it to see the sources, steps and layers, and ask the next question yourself.