Bike Sharing Systems

A couple of interesting bike sharing graphics crossed my desk recently. Martin Austwick created videos of the Boston and Minneapolis bike sharing programs based on data released by the local agencies. Here is Boston. Click to get to the video.

 

The videos show approximate bike locations for each minute of the day. You can see the daily rises and dips in activity. It's remarkable how much activity there is at night (especially in October when it gets dark early.) Around 4AM it gets almost eerily silent and stays that way for a few hours.

For some reason the colors for the Minneapolis video and much more muted and the system is more spread out so it's not as visually arresting. Still, there's an impressive amount of activity throughout the day and night.

David Yanofsky created this graphic comparing the 29 worldwide bike sharing programs, all at the same scale.

This is an interesting  picture of both the programs and the comparative layout of each city. It also serves as a good reminder of how many significant places there are in Asia that we in North America have never even heard of. Even I had to look up Changwon and Zhongshan, both cities of over a million people.