Near Real-time Bike Share Map

The recent debut of New York City’s bike share program has been received enthusiastically by that city’s residents.  GIS Lounge profiled the background GIS data and analysis that went into citing each of the bike share docking stations.  Now, bike share enthusiasts can see the available inventory of bikes for New York city and eighty-four other cities around the world.  The global bike share map was created by Oliver O’Brien, a researcher and software developer at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) with University College London (UCL).

The global bike share map pulls data every 2-10 minutes from each of the city’s bike share operators.  Data is pulled from the city’s API or web site where available.  O’Brien also pulls data from citybik.es, a third-party data collector using PyBikes.  The background map service uses OpenStreetMap data.

The map shows the location of all bike dock stations along with a color coded indicator of the availability of bikes at each station.  The drop down list shows all available cities with bike share map data.  Pick one to zoom to a detailed map of that city’s bike share dock locations.  Hovering the mouse over a location brings up a window with the dock station’s name, the number of bikes available, and the number of spaces.  Dock stations that are empty have an outline around the circle to make them visually easier to identify.  The bottom of the screen contains summary statistics inclduing the overall number of docks, available bikes, and number of empty docks.

The global map contains summary statistics consolidation all of the docks and adds which city is currently the busiest based on percentage of bikes used and total number of bikes in use.  Users can adjust the symbology showing each dock’s available bike inventory by choosing one of eight available color gradients.