
CityBikes: bike sharing networks around the world - robbiet480
https://citybik.es/
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orblivion
This has been around for a while:

[https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdcategory=Navigation...](https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdcategory=Navigation&fdid=be.brunoparmentier.openbikesharing.app&fdpage=3)

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.

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stephenboyd
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-...](https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/01/seattle-bike-share-
pronto-goes-under/513575/)

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

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r3bl
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/](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.

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ubikretail
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?

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dwightgunning
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.

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ubikretail
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.

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sker
Isn't bike sharing huge in China?

Edit: [https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/22/bike-wars-
doc...](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/22/bike-wars-dockless-
china-millions-bicycles-hangzhou)

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

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bizzleDawg
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/](https://yobike.co.uk/)

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

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freyfogle
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=...](http://bikes.oobrien.com/global.php#zoom=3&lon=-60.0000&lat=25.0000)

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martgnz
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](https://citybik.es/projects)

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mrtimo
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.

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andrewshadura
I think I have to mention this:
[http://opensourcebikeshare.com/](http://opensourcebikeshare.com/)

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

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Obi_Juan_Kenobi
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.

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acover
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.

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Kiro
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.

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kmike84
Data is scraped from various sources (APIs, websites). Code is public:
[https://github.com/eskerda/pybikes](https://github.com/eskerda/pybikes).

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harveypoyntz
Thank you

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jakob223
Stockholm's bikes all seem to be underwater? But I rode one yesterday so I
don't think they're actually underwater..

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kh_hk
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

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

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

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

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yorwba
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.

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

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notatoad
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.

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

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

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stuaxo
Why are there 2 in London?

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kh_hk
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/santander-
cycles)

\- [https://citybik.es/map/cycle-hire-slough](https://citybik.es/map/cycle-
hire-slough)

~~~
stuaxo
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/](https://citybik.es/)

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

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

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bbcbasic
Ha ha

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AU_Wow1gle
If you guys know what the competition is for bikeshares in China, you will
know this is probably not real...

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spraak
Can you elaborate?

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AU_Wow1gle
[https://www.ft.com/content/5efe95f6-0aeb-11e7-97d1-5e720a267...](https://www.ft.com/content/5efe95f6-0aeb-11e7-97d1-5e720a26771b?mhq5j=e1)

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spraak
Paywalled link

