Mockup of NYC Bikeshare

Following on from yesterday’s post about the forthcoming New York City bikeshare, I’ve created a mockup of how the scheme might look like on my Bike Share Map. The mockup uses the most popular locations voted for by people on the NYC DoT website. It scales each docking station size by the number of votes received, and pseudorandomly decides how empty or full each docking station is, based on the initial time of the suggestion and whether or not the suggesting person said they worked near there. It’s set so that stations near where the person said they worked are more likely to be full – hence the cluster of full stations in Lower Manhattan and Midtown, while much of Brooklyn’s stations are quite empty.

There is a clickable, zoomable version here – I’ve tried to keep to the published boundaries of the scheme. It shows 585 docking stations (announced target 600), and 9802 bikes (target 10000), with a total of 20988 docking points across the stations. Every suggested docking station that had at least five votes as of a couple of hours ago, has been included.

This is a scheme that will have twice as many bikes as London, in an area only around 50% bigger – and there’s more water in the area. So the density of stations does look higher. The average size of each station (35 docking points, assuming roughly 2.2 docking points for each bike) is also around 50% bigger than London’s (23 on average).