Show HN: I visualized the entire history of Citi Bike in the browser (bikemap.nyc)
Each moving arrow represents one real bike ride out of 291 million, and if you've ever taken a Citi Bike before, you are included in this massive visualization!
You can search for your ride using Cmd + K and your Citi Bike receipt, which should give you the time of your ride and start/end station.
Everything is open source: https://github.com/freemanjiang/bikemap
Some technical details: - No backend! Processed data is stored in parquet files on a Cloudflare CDN, and queried directly by DuckDB WASM
- deck.gl w/ Mapbox for GPU-accelerated rendering of thousands of concurrent animated bikes
- Web Workers decode polyline routes and do as much precomputation as possible off the main thread
- Since only (start, end) station pairs are provided, routes are generated by querying OSRM for the shortest path between all 2,400+ station pairs
16 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 35.6 ms ] threadIn Europe we often accept pretty grave restrictions of our liberty like the UK's Online Safety Act, which would never fly in the US, and we do so without much public comment.
On the other side of things, organisations in the US happily expose datasets like this one, which would give a most EU Data Protection Officers a heart attack, and nobody bats an eyelid.
* Limitations *
The data only contains the start and end station for each trip, but does not contain the full path. Route geometries are computed for each (start station, end station) pair using the shortest path from OSRM.
This means that the computed routes are directionally correct but inexact. Trips that start and end at the same station are filtered out since the route geometry is ambiguous.
Cool visualization.
Do you find the OSRM shortest path routes probable for bikes? Not living in NYC, I expected pretty different paths. Say the "Hudson River Greenway" or whatever that's called.