Steve, here in the lab at CASA, has adapted his popular Tweet-O-Meter display of Twitter activity in cities around the world, for my bike hire maps, to create Bike-O-Meter. Now, on a single screen, you can see lots of Google-powered gauges, showing how busy the bike share schemes around the world are right now. Some show massive spikes during their rush hours, while others are more popular at weekends. Most dials will move every two minutes, a few (the Velib ones) update every 10 or 20 minutes.
At the time of writing, the bike share schemes of the Spanish cities, particularly Barcelona, Girona and Valencia, are the ones being most actively used. Spanish rush-hours at lunchtimes seem generally to be as big as the morning/evening ones! Biking home for the siesta?
There’s a second mode, accessed here, that shows how unbalanced the schemes are – high values indicate that a lot of the bikes are concentrated in one part of the city, and there’s a lot of empty docking stations in another part. The metric is the percentage of bikes that would need to be moved to balance out the docking stations across the city.
Thanks Steve for making this awesome visualisation!