CityBikes: bike sharing networks around the world | Hacker News Reader

CityBikes: bike sharing networks around the world

citybik.es

152 pointsrobbiet48044 comments

This has been around for a while:

https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdcategory=Navigation...

I guess this is the API it uses. It's pretty impressive. Seemingly hundreds of bike sharing systems are on this thing. It uses OSM for the background, and gives you a reading on how many bikes are at a given station.

They should remove Seattle's entry here. The Pronto network was cancelled in March due to disuse.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/01/seattle-bike-...

Weirdly there was a pull request [1] merged already to remove Pronto, not sure why it's still appearing...

[1]: https://github.com/eskerda/pybikes/pull/242

Seattle has a mandatory helmet law. Are there any successful bike shares in places with helmet laws?

Vancouver's seems to be pretty successful and BC has a bike helmet law.

Vancouver's Mobi bike system did a good job with their messaging around helmets to make it optional to users. There is a helmet attached to each bike lock, and a convenient basket on the bike where you can put the helmet if you don't want to use it.

Yes, when those laws are in place, but almost never actually enforced. Nextbike[0] is extremely popular in my city, even though my country has a helmet law in place. They also offer a bike for 30 minutes per day completely free (you can also rent two bikes for free at the same time), so that alone makes it a pretty easy way to travel through half a city without paying a dime. Not a day goes by without me seeing one[1].

As far as my experience goes, the country did try heavily enforcing the helmet law when they first introduced it (about a decade ago), now it seems to me like the police simply doesn't care if you're wearing a helmet or not.

Of course, if you commit any other traffic violation on a bike, you can be pretty damn sure that they're gonna bundle it with "not wearing a helmet" fine.

[0] https://nextbike.com/

[1] I live within a walking distance from the place I work in, so there's no need for me to use one every day.

I built an app over it that attempts to predict the future state of any network. It later recommends addings/substractions in order to keep offer and demand balanced among stations.

It could work in about 440 cities but none of the big companies that lead this wanted this. What would you do with it?

That depends why they don't want it. Did any explain this? Maybe you're not articulating the value prop?

That'll be a good way to decide whether to keep trying to sell to them, what to change etc.

If you've exhausted that you may look at other applications for the technology.

I found two reasons here: - They make money by using bikes as advertising space, so they do not really care about the overall quality of the system as long as they have a permanent exploitation contract.

- They use historic data to approach future situations. In spite they do not have alert systems, they seem to think this is enough. Although, when sun suddenly appears, the shore tends to get crowded and "locked" for hours; they doing nothing about it.

What my system was going to provide was smart routes for the vans, to add or subtract bikes on strategic places.

I'm pretty sure all these companies already have a system like that. The problem is actually getting the bikes moved given the amount of personnel/vans they have.

This is interesting, because when I'm in front of an empty station, the app would tell me when I get a chance to have someone park a bike. With an app telling me it should happen in less than 2mn, I can wait confidently. My network : Velib, Paris.

Isn't bike sharing huge in China?

Edit: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/22/bike-wars-doc...

> the world’s 15 biggest public bike shares are ranked. Thirteen of them are in China.

My local city has just got a slightly different type of bike sharing scheme where there are no stations/docks for the bikes, but you're allowed to leave them anywhere sensible [1]. From other articles including the guardian one linked above, it seems that this a model that's been used in China and certainly seems to have proven very rapidly scalable.

I guess in these cases it's quite difficult, since it's likely not feasible to update the locations of individual bikes for these guys. I've checked their map and Bristol, UK doesn't appear to show YoBike at the moment, however it's only been in action for a few weeks.

[1]: https://yobike.co.uk/

There's a similar system in Prague and Brno, Rekola.

This bike share visualization is also very good, has many different cities and lets you replay them over time http://bikes.oobrien.com/global.php#zoom=3&lon=-60.0000&lat=...

Great project, it seems that some companies —like Citymapper— use the API[0]. Would be nice if they also contributed with code or supported the author.

[0]: https://citybik.es/projects

Just spent 3 weeks in 6 cities in China. Ofo and Mobike seems to be the biggest bike share companies. There is also a company that makes electric bikes (with hub motor) available for bike share.

How they work: 1. Pay a deposit (99 RMB for Ofo, 299 RMB for Mobike) and register 2. Scan the QR code to unlock the bike -Mobike will unlock automatically- Ofo will send a pin to your phone that you can use to unlock the bike. 3. When you are done, just lock up your bike (rear wheel) and leave it anywhere.

In Shanghai it was common to see incensed security Guards dragging bikes off premises. Bikes definitely do clutter up precious walking space.

I think I have to mention this: http://opensourcebikeshare.com/

It's really tempting to buy a few $99 bikes from Walmart and setup a bike share.

Those bikes would become inoperable within days, and could present significant legal liability.

Citibikes and such are quite heavy because they must withstand a lot of abuse. The quality of 'department store' bikes are very low; they're often not even assembled correctly.

Anecdote: I've logged hundreds of hours on mine.

An LLC, waiver and self inspection might avoid the liability. This is just too complicated though.

Obviously, there needs to be a maintenance team.

How is the data gathered? In Stockholm all three items were in the middle of the water without any real information. The names sounded faux and were ungooglable.

Data is scraped from various sources (APIs, websites). Code is public: https://github.com/eskerda/pybikes.

Thank you

Stockholm's bikes all seem to be underwater? But I rode one yesterday so I don't think they're actually underwater..

Seems Stockholm's system in Citybikes were the remnants of a test project by JCDecaux, which was providing the data. The actual project on Stockholm is run (or at least used to be) by ClearChannel.

Actually, many years ago we supported Stockholm's system but stopped doing so after receiving a C&D by, apparently, a sole guy that had permission to use the data in exchange for providing the apps. Most possibly the situation has changed (this was more than 5 years ago) but it left an aftertaste that has stopped me from adding it. A PR to the project for adding Stockholm would be welcome, though.

// Disclaimer: citybikes

Great list! Donkey Republic ("global" but from Copenhagen) is missing though: https://www.donkey.bike

And the one in Stockholm, whose domain is very close to yours! http://www.citybikes.se

It should be called "around the rest of the world" since it omits the biggest and hyper competitive bikeshares in some Chinese cities.

Since the info is scraped from the respective official websites, the Chinese networks will only be added once someone puts in the work to reverse-engineer their apps.

It doesn't seem very consistent. Lots of points in Latin America but when you zoom in, they are all gone.

I think you're just seeing a poor design choice: the purple dots they use to indicate cities with bike shares are very visible at the whole-world zoom level, but virtually impossible to see when you've zoomed in because they're the same size and in the same location as the map's default city marker.

Rosario Argentina seems pretty up to date looking at street level. But the city markers just disappear.

Portland just has one because Nike bought all the bikes. That is why they are all in Nike orange.

This is great. I wish more things were universal like this :)

Why are there 2 in London?

In case you mean the dot just next to London, that's a town named Slough, with their own bike share system. By clicking on the dots you can actually zoom in on the systems. Here are some links with these zoomed in:

- https://citybik.es/map/santander-cycles

- https://citybik.es/map/cycle-hire-slough

No, I actually zoomed right into street level in central London and could see two bikes.

I just assumed it was a different system to Santander cycles, so thought it should be zero.

To reproduce go to

https://citybik.es/

Don't type in anything, just zoom/pan until you get to central London.

I read: "bike shedding networks around the world", and I thought "Don't they just call those internet forums?".

Ha ha

If you guys know what the competition is for bikeshares in China, you will know this is probably not real...

Can you elaborate?

https://www.ft.com/content/5efe95f6-0aeb-11e7-97d1-5e720a267...

Paywalled link

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