The focus of this essay is to study the relationship between the usage pattern of public bike-sharing system subscribers and the location of the individual bike station in terms of height. Our hypothesis is that stations at higher elevations are more likely to be used as points of departure rather than arrival, and the opposite for stations with lower elevations.

Based on data gathered in Chicago and the Greater Boston Area we apply a multiple linear regression analysis with relative elevation, gender and age as regressors, and the proportion of departures of the total activity at each station as the regressand. As an estimator, Weighted Least Squares (WLS) is used. The bike stations activity is varying, and this might cause skewness in the data, something that WLS can reduce. The result from the regression analysis shows that the relative elevation of the station does influence the stations usage pattern, but the parameter value for this regressor is small. The age and gender parameters are not statistically significant, so we end up with a simple linear regression with relative elevation as the only regressor.

The conclusion is thus that even though the relative elevation of the bike station do have a statistically significant impact on the usage pattern in both cities. If the study had been undertaken in cities with more varied topography than Boston or Chicago, the result might have been different. We therefore consider this a field that could benefit from research that is more extensive in the future.