Categories
Mashups

Bike Hire Around the World

My map/visualisation of the Boris Bikes – the London cycle hire scheme – is now available for four eight fifteen more cities. The complete list:

Paris has so many docking stations that many browsers and computers will struggle to show everything – although the site and animations work very well in Webkit-based web browsers such as Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome. The maps are all at approximately* the same scale.

Montreal’s scheme is similar to London’s – indeed the underlying technology (Bixi) is the same and in fact the London system was bought in from Montreal. Paris’s scheme (Vélib) is quite different and, because a separate webpage has to be loaded for each one of the 1200 docking stations, the map only updates once every 20 minutes. Seville and Brussels also use Vélib and update once every 10 minutes, while Montreal, along with Denver, Girona, London, Washington DC and Melbourne, update every two minutes.

More cities to follow soon!

* There is a slight difference in scale depending on the latitude of the city, the difference equal to the difference in the cosines of the respective latitudes.

11 replies on “Bike Hire Around the World”

Addy: Copenhagen’s scheme is very low-tech — a supermarket trolley style coin deposit, and no electronics. Amsterdam doesn’t have a public scheme, just private operators that hire bikes on a daily basis.

Paul – I’m afraid I can’t (yet) include Brisbane as JCDecaux have asked me to stop getting the bike data from their websites, and they run the Brisbane scheme.

Corey – Yes, I was writing that sentence from the perspective that I had first included London on my map, then later added in Montreal, but in terms of the technology you are quite right, I have added a clarification to the sentence.

Great site Oliver. Thank you.

It is of particular interest to me as we have mandatory helmet legislation in Australia and I think, by looking at your visualisations, that it is seriously impacting on the Melbourne Bike Share scheme.

Brisbane recently rolled out a scheme based on the Vélib bikes at http://www.citycycle.com.au – is there any chance you can incorporate that data?

Cheers,

@Matt – let me know any others you would like and I’ll see what I can do. There needs to be a website where I can grab the data from.

@Emre – I’m just scraping the data from the Captial Bikeshare website. It is using the same system (Bixi) as Montreal and London, so adapting my Montreal script was quite straightforward. The data is here: http://www.capitalbikeshare.com/stations/bikeStations.xml

I don’t think they do have live feeds, although if you do find some, point me to them and I’ll see what I can do.

Other cities which do have near-live feeds that I tried – Stockholm blocked me, Shanghai rate-limited me and Cardiff has a ID that changes at midnight every night.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *