When I found this data graph for DC's awesome Capital BikeShare, I became nearly giddy. I've been playing with it for the last hour or so, and I'm like a kid in a candy store. My heart is aflutter - for real! All my favorite things! I love metrics. I love cities. I love interactive real time data. I love bikes, and more so bike shares. I love CaBi. so proud to be one of the founding members (as one of the first 2,000 members with a free t-shirt and commemorative keyfob....(geekster grin: Geek + Hipster = Geekster!)). I love public transport, and more so if it's extra-green and innovative public transport.
Here's the link again...now let's play! So much data depicted on first click. First, the overall view of the CaBi program is the homescreen. Larger circles denote larger stations with more bike docks. The color of the circles show how full/empty the docks are - blue is emptier, deep red is an completley full station. The graph is realtime, and the lower right hand corner gives usage stats. Right now, pretty late on a Thursday evening, use is a low, sleepy 3%. The max simultaneous usage for today was 173 bikes, in use, or a respectable 20% of all available bikes in use (more about this later). That lower right hand info box has some pretty cool extra features. You can show or hide a ticker which tells you bikes going in and out of station realtime. It also shows usage and distribution imbalance datagraphs for the day. Around 5pm, today the fewest bikes were in docks - or conversely, the most were in use.
Even more fun...there is an animation button where we can see those station circles go from blue to red and back again in a neato timelapse run. See how, people head downtown, and then back to residential districts over the course of a day. Sounds like a commuter city, until you realize this is by bikes, not crawling on the Beltway! Mixed-use zones - shopping/residential/business like Dupont Circle and Capitol Hill get used all day.
Then, there's a little thrill ride here...Click on a station, and see it's dock stats for the last 24-hour period - the peaks and valleys of rush hour, the sharp zig-zags of frequent use. For example, 16th and U has a precipitous drop from totally full to totally empty during the morning rush hour, as this high-density, young, urban hipster neighborhood heads out to work, presumably downhill towards downtown. The Union Station dock does the same, with an opposite effect - all the bikes are taken from this busy transit hub around 6pm and dispersed to other docks within the nearby residential neighborhood. One of my local stations at 14th and D Streets SE gets decent use throughout the day, but by 9pm, it's docks are full. This matches my recent experience, when one evening, I grabbed a CaBi bike from the pool toward home, and found no docks at this station. I had to ride a few blocks farther, though not too much off my path, to return my bike to a different station. And Eastern Market (8th and Penn SE) and Dupont Circle stations get a fair amount of usage throughout the day.
And that awesome little addictive live data set led me to the supra-awesome blog Suprageography: I see data, I make maps that covers bikeshare data stats for several urban bikeshare programs around the world. WOW! I totally [HEART] that Oliver guy! He recently posted about a big day for bikesharing - Easter Sunday - where he notes there was HUGE usage in DC (in the #1 ranking), Miami, and London - all soaring above 35% simultaneous bikes in use. In DC 37% of our 872 bikes were in use at about 4 in the afternoon (I'm reasonably sure I had a bike out about that time). He notes that usage rates above 30% stress the system, and it is difficult to find a bike in many places. His table shows that not only is DC an amazing bikesharing city, but we have a relatively large program with our almost 900 books, especially with the relative size of our population compared to some of the other bikesharing cities - like London and Mexico City. And, as he kindly points out so I don't have to be all puffy about it, America is beating Europe!
Yay, CaBi! Yay DC! I could eat this stuff all day.
Here's the link again...now let's play! So much data depicted on first click. First, the overall view of the CaBi program is the homescreen. Larger circles denote larger stations with more bike docks. The color of the circles show how full/empty the docks are - blue is emptier, deep red is an completley full station. The graph is realtime, and the lower right hand corner gives usage stats. Right now, pretty late on a Thursday evening, use is a low, sleepy 3%. The max simultaneous usage for today was 173 bikes, in use, or a respectable 20% of all available bikes in use (more about this later). That lower right hand info box has some pretty cool extra features. You can show or hide a ticker which tells you bikes going in and out of station realtime. It also shows usage and distribution imbalance datagraphs for the day. Around 5pm, today the fewest bikes were in docks - or conversely, the most were in use.
Even more fun...there is an animation button where we can see those station circles go from blue to red and back again in a neato timelapse run. See how, people head downtown, and then back to residential districts over the course of a day. Sounds like a commuter city, until you realize this is by bikes, not crawling on the Beltway! Mixed-use zones - shopping/residential/business like Dupont Circle and Capitol Hill get used all day.
Then, there's a little thrill ride here...Click on a station, and see it's dock stats for the last 24-hour period - the peaks and valleys of rush hour, the sharp zig-zags of frequent use. For example, 16th and U has a precipitous drop from totally full to totally empty during the morning rush hour, as this high-density, young, urban hipster neighborhood heads out to work, presumably downhill towards downtown. The Union Station dock does the same, with an opposite effect - all the bikes are taken from this busy transit hub around 6pm and dispersed to other docks within the nearby residential neighborhood. One of my local stations at 14th and D Streets SE gets decent use throughout the day, but by 9pm, it's docks are full. This matches my recent experience, when one evening, I grabbed a CaBi bike from the pool toward home, and found no docks at this station. I had to ride a few blocks farther, though not too much off my path, to return my bike to a different station. And Eastern Market (8th and Penn SE) and Dupont Circle stations get a fair amount of usage throughout the day.
And that awesome little addictive live data set led me to the supra-awesome blog Suprageography: I see data, I make maps that covers bikeshare data stats for several urban bikeshare programs around the world. WOW! I totally [HEART] that Oliver guy! He recently posted about a big day for bikesharing - Easter Sunday - where he notes there was HUGE usage in DC (in the #1 ranking), Miami, and London - all soaring above 35% simultaneous bikes in use. In DC 37% of our 872 bikes were in use at about 4 in the afternoon (I'm reasonably sure I had a bike out about that time). He notes that usage rates above 30% stress the system, and it is difficult to find a bike in many places. His table shows that not only is DC an amazing bikesharing city, but we have a relatively large program with our almost 900 books, especially with the relative size of our population compared to some of the other bikesharing cities - like London and Mexico City. And, as he kindly points out so I don't have to be all puffy about it, America is beating Europe!
Yay, CaBi! Yay DC! I could eat this stuff all day.
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