Screenshot of the Barclay Cycle Hire iPhone app.
City University London’s School of Informatics uses Geographic Information System (GIS) to map in real-time the city’s new shared bike system, Barclays Cycle Hire, to help predict and document bike usage and availability at each of the system’s 400 planned docking stations that are designed to house more than 6,000 bikes. Currently, the map includes data for more than 300 docking stations throughout London, showing when bikes are in high use and other general patterns at each station.
Geoinformatics
Researchers developed an application that includes graphs of London’s bike availability over the past 24 hours (orange line) compared to average bike usage from the week before (gray line.) Data are updated in real time, showing the actual status of each station, revealing the dynamics of biking and travel at specific sites in the city over the span of a typical day.
Graphs show Barclays bike usage at different docking stations. Photo by City University of London giCentre.
The students also used an information visualization system, known as treemaps, that uses hierarchical categories of rectangles within sub-branches to show the information in context around the city. The size of the rectangles are proportional to the capacity of bikes at the station. The color of the station correlates with the number of bikes at the station — the darker the color, the more bikes are available. (Try holding your mouse button down and pressing the indicated letters above the map to use the interactive feature to see a “grid view” of the status of each docking station more clearly. In this view, the proportion of bikes at each station is indicated by the height of the blue bar. Also, very full or very empty stations are shown with a lighter or darker border.)
The usage at the different stations varies widely.
Maps visualize data using treemaps design. Photo by City University of London's giCentre.
- The availability of bikes at nearly all stations dips between noon and 5:00 p.m.
- Hardwick Street, Clerkenwell, in downtown central London, had almost no available bikes between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m.
- A number of stations experience peak usage between 8:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. — and others experience very little usage (or none at all) during that same time period.
- A few stations experienced very high usage as late as 8:00 p.m.
- For the most part, the graphs showing data from the past 24 hours are similar to the averages gathered from the past week, but there were some anomalies.
More focus on information visualization
The city is also working on creating a new bike map of cycling routes in the city (there is currently no single uniform map) comparable to the London Tube system map. One pro-cycling magazine is even leading a campaign for a better cycle map, advocating for something along the lines of this map created by Simon Parker:
Cycle map created by Simon Parker. Image via Cycle Lifestyle magazine.
Mobile app developer FIPLAB Ltd. also created an iPhone app, London Cycle: Maps & Routes, that shows real-time availability at bike stations around the city, maps specific locations, shows safe biking routes and alerts users when it’s time to return a bike.
It will be exciting to obtain user feedback on these new technologies and track whether these systems increase usage of the bike share system, especially among people who might have found the systems inconvenient without these technologies.
