Where's My Bike? The Real Time Capital Bikeshare Map

• April 14th 2011

by UrbanTurf Staff

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Lydia DePillis has two very interesting pieces in this week’s City Paper — one on regional housing market expert Stephen Fuller and another in which she shadowed the man in charge of making sure that everything runs smoothly with Capital Bikeshare here in the city.

Juan Botero, an employee for Alta (the company that runs Capital Bikeshare) spends his mornings monitoring Bikeshare stations across the region to make sure that each is appropriately stocked with bikes. DePillis writes that Botero uses “a map of the system that automatically updates every three minutes to show how many bikes are at each of the 109 stations.” While this map has likely been around for some time, UrbanTurf was pretty wowed by how useful it could be for people who use the bike-sharing service frequently.

The most important feature of the map from a rider’s perspective is that it provides data on how many bicycles and empty spaces are available at each station in the region. For example, as of this post being published, there are 12 bikes and three open spaces at the 19th Street and East Capitol Street SE station, but no bikes at the 14th and Rhode Island station. So, in the same way that some people check WMATA’s NextBus website to approximate when they should leave their home or office to catch a bus, this map is updated frequently enough that users can essentially do the same thing to grab a bike from their nearby bike station.

The map also tracks statistics for the total number of bikes currently in use and available at all stations, and tracks the highest number of bikes used at one time during the day. The size of the circles on the map are representative of the size of each station.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.production.logicbrush.com/articles/blog/wheres_my_bike_the_real_time_capital_bikeshare_map/3328.