At the end of each year (normally between Christmas and New Year), there’s a lot to tidyup across Bike Share Map (BSM), the Meddin Bike-Sharing World Map (BSWM) and the UK Shared Micromobility Dashboard. This year, I’m aiming to document all the changes needed, roughly around the time that I make the changes.
Monday:
- Superpedestrian (aka LINK) have unexpectedly changed their URL prefix for their GBFS feeds from https://wrangler-mds-production.herokuapp.com/gbfs/{City}/{file}.json to https://mds.linkyour.city/gbfs/[2.2/]{a2}_{city}]/{file}.json. Superpedestrian run the Nottingham escootershare, the fifth largest city for the mode in the UK, so it’s good to have the live data back for that. They also run various other escootershares around the world.
- A number of the UK shared e-scooter trials ended at the end of November: Slough (Neuron), Canterbury (Bird), West Bromwich (Voi) and Sunderland (Neuron) – the last due to be replaced by a new Zwings fleet but this will not now launch until the new year – a significant service gap. The Neuron systems had open GBFS feeds (as does Newcastle, their last remaining UK one, although at the time of writing it is returning a 503 server error), so could be tracked live. Canterbury and West Bromwich unfortunately aren’t. I’ve stopped consuming the GBFS feed for Slough and Sunderland.
- In addition, there have been very few (if any) escooters visible on many of the Ginger systems, on their app – Milton Keynes (where they compete with Lime and TIER), Hartlepool, Scunthorpe, Whitehaven and even Middlesbrough (the first trial to launch). Only Chester and Great Yarmouth are still going strong. As is often the case with Ginger in particular, there is no news about this. Maybe they are just taking a Christmas/New Year break? The parking locations and zone boundaries still show in their app – but they do for Stafford too, where Ginger pulled out in late 2021. There are GBFS feeds available for some of the Ginger systems, through the Joyride white-label platform they use.
- Normally I stop consuming individual GBFS (and other API) feeds during a system’s winter closure period, however the variation with when systems reopen in the new year mean I often miss a few days (or weeks!) when they do restart, so this year I will keep consuming the empty feeds. I am gradually building a guide to indicative months that systems close and reopen, on BSWM, and will correlate this with the data seen in BSM (where available) and publish this additional static data, some time next year.
- Lincoln’s tiny Hire Bike website’s certificate has expired, apparently without the operator noticing, so I needed to skip verification of it when getting the website data. To be fair, it did expire on Christmas Day…
- Aberdeen’s Bike Issue Bikes ebikeshare finally opened in early November – perhaps with some of their bikes from their recently closed Bristol operation. I have updated the BSWM entry.
- Down the coast, the Dundee ebikeshare has gone into a longer winter hibernation this year – more of a temporary closure during a quite time of the year to improve the fleet and operations, rather than snow/ice led, although Scotland is certainly getting some weather at the moment.