Real-time bikeshare maps.

[randomness]

http://bikes.oobrien.com/ has real-time bikeshare maps for many cities around the world. A few cities, like Paris, have stopped sharing data for some reason. Most of the others, including Montreal and Washington, seem to be okay sharing their station data. The maps also list how many stations are empty and how many are full, as well as circling them on the map. If you click on a station, you get a graph of how many bikes have been at that station in the last 24 hours.


It's really quite cool.

Comments

[chris-warrior.livejournal.com]

i wonder if they somehow linked sharing data on full stations led to theft, or some other misuse of the system... i've been curious about how it worked for awhile now; gonna go look at the site. :)

edited to add: i find it kind of weird that they don't appear to have a link to the actual service pages from their graph. you're retrieving and using their data and yet not sponsoring links to get a bike? perhaps i'm too commercially-minded. *wry grin*

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Oh, I think those are both problems with the bike service organizations not being sufficiently commercially-minded. bikes.oobrien.com is just being run by Oliver O'Brien, a guy who thinks it's cool; the bike sharing outfits should contact him about placing ads.

The bikeshare services have suffered from some significant mismanagement and the fact they haven't followed up on this is only a very small symptom of this.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I just found this at a post on his blog:

If I were to speculate for a moment, it would appear that some operators may be realising there is potentially a commercial value in the data – maybe in controlling that data, they can ensure it is only viewed within the context of an official app, be it chargeable, served with ads, or available as an exclusive value-added benefit to annual members. There’s nothing wrong with this – after all, like most public transport, its very difficult for bike share schemes to be commercially viable on their own – if you don’t quantify the social, environmental and touristic benefit they bring to a city. Any extra potential revenue is important. But it’s a shame – my map could have been so much more interesting.

North America seems to have the right idea – the data is free and easy to access for almost all the schemes across the US and Canada. In Washington DC they even publish the bike breakdown rates and reasons. And there is one good piece of news from Europe. London has, earlier this week, released the official feed – and API documentation for their own, hugely popular, bike share – Barclays Cycle Hire. It appears both on the transport authority’s website and in the city’s open data catalogue. While it is not perfect – you still need to sign up to see the data, and I’m still waiting on my approval – it is encouraging that my home city is, unlike most places on the continent, going in the right direction.