alt Hacker NewsShow HN: I visualized the entire history of Citi Bike in the browser
Each moving arrow represents one real bike ride out of 291 million, and if you've ever taken a Citi Bike before, you are included in this massive visualization!
You can search for your ride using Cmd + K and your Citi Bike receipt, which should give you the time of your ride and start/end station.
Everything is open source: https://github.com/freemanjiang/bikemap
Some technical details: - No backend! Processed data is stored in parquet files on a Cloudflare CDN, and queried directly by DuckDB WASM
- deck.gl w/ Mapbox for GPU-accelerated rendering of thousands of concurrent animated bikes
- Web Workers decode polyline routes and do as much precomputation as possible off the main thread
- Since only (start, end) station pairs are provided, routes are generated by querying OSRM for the shortest path between all 2,400+ station pairs
Comments
Cool project. Thanks for sharing!
The link above points to a 404 error page on GitHub. Looks like you forgot the hyphen in the name part of the url.
I’m working with subway data, particularly the A subway line, 32 mi long with about 2million trips over 6 months across 66 stations. Trying to train a convlstm to learn the spatiotemporal propagation of train headways.
I really wish Lyft invested in maintenance. I used Citibike this week for the first time in about a year, and the Hudson River Greenway dock by NY Waterway had 1/3 of its empty docks broken with flashing red lights, then about 5 ebikes that needed service.
Interesting that citibike publishes trip level data. The bike share schemes in Dublin only publish station counts or free bike locations. So you can see the overall pattern of bike motion, but there’s no way to see how many north side trips go to the docks vs Heuston station vs the city center.
non corrupted github link: https://github.com/freeman-jiang/bikemap.nyc
Cool visualization.
Do you find the OSRM shortest path routes probable for bikes? Not living in NYC, I expected pretty different paths. Say the "Hudson River Greenway" or whatever that's called.
This is awesome. I had no idea Lyft publishes ride data, time to explore the DC version!
This is just so cool! Not much more to add. Thanks a lot for sharing!! Great work :)
this is really nice. One request: when searching for a station name, let me type "and" instead of "&" e.g. typing "E 47th St and 2 Ave" would still return "E 47th & 2 Ave".
I've seen many visualizations of the citibike data over the years, this is one of the most charismatic for sure!
It says “entire history” but seems to start at Jan 1, 2025?
How was the data gathered? They just publicly show the bike's locations?
How is MapBox going for this free tool? Is it costing you money?
It's often interesting to observe the different ways that privacy is approached in the US and Europe.
In Europe we often accept pretty grave restrictions of our liberty like the UK's Online Safety Act, which would never fly in the US, and we do so without much public comment.
On the other side of things, organisations in the US happily expose datasets like this one, which would give a most EU Data Protection Officers a heart attack, and nobody bats an eyelid.
Awesome work!
Relevant callout from https://bikemap.nyc/about:
* Limitations *
The data only contains the start and end station for each trip, but does not contain the full path. Route geometries are computed for each (start station, end station) pair using the shortest path from OSRM.
This means that the computed routes are directionally correct but inexact. Trips that start and end at the same station are filtered out since the route geometry is ambiguous.