Bike-o-Meter: Global Bicycle Hire Dials

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Our now 'resident in the British Library Tweet-o-Meter' has been adapted to display Bike Hire in cities around the world - welcome to the latest out of the CASA, University College London : Bike-O-Meter. On a single screen, you can view via Google-powered gauges, how busy (in percent of use) the bike share schemes around the world are right now.

Most dials will move every two minutes, a few (the Velib ones) update every 10 or 20 minutes.

At the time of writing, the bike share schemes of the Spanish cities, particularly Barcelona, Girona and Valencia, are the ones being most actively used. Spanish rush-hours at lunchtimes seem generally to be as big as the morning/evening ones! Biking home for the siesta?


Central to this visualiation is Oliver G O'Brien of CASA, his map/visualisation of the London Boris Bikes is now available for fifteen more cities. The complete list:

• Barcelona (Bicing)
• Brussels (Villo)
• Denver (B-cycle)
• Dublin (db Bikes)
• Girona (Girocleta)
• London (Barclays Cycle Hire)
• Melbourne (Bike Share)
• Milan (Mibike)
• Minneapolis (Nice Ride)
• Montreal (Bixi)
• Paris (Vélib)
• Seville (Sevici)
• Toyama (Cyclocity)
• Valencia (Valenbisi)
• Vienna (Citybike)
• Washington DC (Capital Bikeshare)

There is a second mode in Bike-o-Meter, accessed here, detailing how unbalanced the schemes are – high values indicate that a lot of the bikes are concentrated in one part of the city, and there’s a lot of empty docking stations in another part. The metric is the percentage of bikes that would need to be moved to balance out the docking stations across the city.

Thanks go to Ollie for the original Boris Bikes maps along with Steve Gray, also of CASA and Tweet-o-Meter/SurveyMapper fame for putting it together.

We will have more news on the Tweet-o-Meter as part of the Growing Knowledge Exhibition at the British Library soon....