Bike O'Meter Gives Real-Time Snapshot of Bikesharing Worldwide

If you haven't already seen the interactive, animated map that shows station activity for Capital Bikeshare stations, be sure to check it out here.  Following on that, and using the same data, a new app created by Steven Gray, called Bike-o-Meter, is also providing useful real-time data on bikesharing systems from around the world.

Each of the dials shows the percentage of total bikes in use at that particular moment in time.  It is not able to differentiate between bikes that are actually being ridden and those that may be in transit for relocation or taken out for servicing.  However, it uses the maximum number of bikes in the system within the last 24 hours--not the advertised total number of bikes owned by the service--as the denominator in the calculation.  Here's a bigger screenshot showing 2.8% of Capital Bikeshare's bikes in use at 1:04 PM on Wednesday, October 27.

I noticed that Barcelona's usage rate at 7:00 PM was 22%.  There were about 4500 bikes in service in Barcelona at that time, so that's almost 1000 bikes in use.  Wow!  Click on either graphic for a larger view.

The Solution to the Pole Hogs

While in Barcelona recently, I had the opportunity to experience their metro system.  They have a simple solution to one of the problems often experienced by Metro riders in DC: pole hogs.  Some riders of the DC Metro will lean against the stanchions or otherwise make it difficult for several people to hold onto a single stanchion.  In Barcelona, many of the trains have these (see photo).  I wish I had taken a photo from farther away, because the top and the bottom of the stanchion are a single pole just like in DC, but the center section splits into three--allowing more people to comfortably hold on in the same amount of space.  This appears to be a solution that could be retrofit in existing cars by cutting out the center of an existing stanchion and welding on these midsection portions.

Photo by Jaume Meneses on Flickr

You can see another view of them in this photo to the right:

The Barcelona Metro also uses waiting time countdown clocks like the DC Metro. . .except theirs counts down to the second.  And they're pretty accurate, too.  This one shows the next train is expected in 1 minute and 41 seconds, which is pretty much exactly when it arrived: