Make citybike cycle hiring scheme data publicly available as open data

[lbuk]

I'm working on the National Propensity Cycle Tool for Liverpool. Making citybike (cycling hiring scheme) data publicly available (time of day, direction of travel, seasonal changes) would really help software developers and city planners improve cycling infrastructure in the city. Thanks.

[mdunschen]

Here a copy from an email exchange I had with the CEO of hourbike, the company that operates the city bikes.

"From: Mitch Vars
Sent: ‎07/‎12/‎2015 16:46
To: Martin Dunschen
Cc: tim.caswell@hourbike.com
Subject: Re: Open Data for Hire Bike stations

Hello Martin & Tim,

I'd be happy to answer any questions you may have about the bike share data feed specification (GBFS). In the past, US cities have done things much as you describe, we each have our own proprietary APIs and developers have had to hunt for them, scraping sites for bike and dock numbers, station locations etc.

The GBFS standard aims to make it easy for app developers to locate and digest bikeshare data to speed development of applications that support bike share operators. The first version of the specification was released in early November and has been implemented in about 9 cities so far. By Jan 1st we expect implementation by all the major North American technology suppliers as well as some in France and Germany.

Currently we're in the process of migrating the project to GitHub. The GitHub page can be found here along with a link to a draft version of the specification:

https://github.com/NABSA/gbfs

Thanks

Mitch Vars
I.T. Director - Nice Ride Minnesota
612-436-2073 (office) | 612-788-7627 (mobile)
2701 36th Avenue South | Minneapolis, MN 55406
www.niceridemn.org

On Mon, Dec 7, 2015 at 7:33 AM, Martin Dunschen mdunschen@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Tim

I am trying to see your point, but surely the "abuse" of the data does not seem to be an issue in the US (see the links I've sent), so why would it be an issue here? What kind of abuse are you talking about?

As I understand it, the API you would offer to those who "need" it requires some Microsoft accreditation, is that correct?

I have not looked in detail how the US open standard will work (it is referred to as "General bikeshare feed specification" in short GBFS, I've copied in Mitch Vars, who might be able to share more information on this?), but in effect we would hope to have a javascript library that can poll your server, let's say with a geolocation (lat, lon) and a radius to return a JSON object with a list of the hire stations within that radius, their geolocation and the number of bikes available at each station, or maybe even encode if a station is temporarily unavailable. I am sure the US plans will include more information, like hire conditions (times, cost, how to sign up...). The best way forward in my view would be to simply adopt the same standard as bike sharing organisations in the US agreed on.

I will end with a quote from the NABSA website, and I think this really sums it up why we need open access and an open standard for this kind of data:
The open data standard will improve transparency and public access to bikeshare information and allow end users to create integrated software and end user applications. Available data includes station locations, bike and dock availability, pricing information, etc.
“With more than fifty bikeshare systems launched in North America since 2010, bikeshare has quickly become an important part of our transportation ecosystem. Establishing an open data standard is an important step to making bikeshare ever more convenient and accessible to the public,” says NABSA representative MitchVars.

Kind Regards

Martin Dunschen

On 7 December 2015 at 11:27, Tim Caswell tim.caswell@hourbike.com wrote:

Hi Martin,

Thanks for our email. We do have a webservice API for bike availability data available to anyone that needs it, but we don't publish it as a public open interface we have had experience of people abusing it in the past. I think what we'll do is add some detail to the website inviting people to get in touch if they want direct access to the data.

Thanks

Tim

On 05/12/2015 12:17, Martin Dunschen wrote:

Hi Tim

I've found your email on this hourbike website (http://www.bicyclesharingsystems.com/page10.php).

I was interested to read that the US based bike sharing companies agreed on an open data format for their hire stations, see here: http://nabsa.net/ or http://www.streetsblog.org/2015/11/25/bike-share-open-data-standard-clears-the-way-for-better-trip-planning-apps/

Recently when I was involved with planning the CycleNation conference in Liverpool I wanted to create an interactive map that would show the venue of the conference as well as the citybike hire stations nearby with the live data of bikes available. I was hoping to find an API to the citybike hirestation data, but that does not exist, or is not 'open'. A few people I know here in Liverpool told me that they had solved the problem by web-scraping the site.

Clearly there should be a better way to get to the data, and I would like to find out if you would consider adopting the proposed US data scheme?

Kind Regards

Martin Dunschen

Tim Caswell
Managing Director

Hourbike Ltd
39 Pilgrims Way | Bisley | Surrey GU24 9DQ
mobile +44(0) 7767 817291 |tel +44(0)1483 472 804
www.hourbike.com
Confidentiality Note: This email may contain confidential and/or private information. If you received this email in error please delete and notify sender.

"

[jamieisboss]

First, this made me laugh a little being at the end of that email chain

Confidentiality Note: This email may contain confidential and/or private information. If you received this email in error please delete and notify sender.

To my actual point though, perhaps what could help persuade Tim Caswell would be some more examples of how the data could be integrated for a long term project or into an app, demonstrating that there would be a financial benefit to his company if this data were available. An integration with blackboard for instance could allow students to register for the year at the student rate without needing the secondary approval process (saving time) and having information about bikes near your location right inside the system im using anyway would have encouraged me to use them more as i could wait and get some work done if there were none outside currently, and now with serviceworkers it could alert me in the browser tht a bike had just become avaialable ifi'd said i was waiting, meaning i could concentrate on what i was doing not constantly checking instead i ended up not renewing my annual membership because i hadn't used the bikes enough to justify it. I might have kept using a pay as you go service though if i could top up the balance instantly from my university 'virtual purse' (got to love the terms they use) when i could see a bike was good to go nearby.

A similar service with non-hypothetical examples might be the TFL data that was made available, I used to work as a Cisco phone engineer and I know a few companies had a little app installed on the deskphones to let people know about delays or service changes towards the end of the day, it meant that TFL had less people filling up he stations when here were delays (though not a huge amount, mostly because most companies didn't know you could put apps on those phones [or more accurately, the people who knew didn't have any kind of authority to actually install any, that seems so odd now but at the time applications running on phones was a weird concept]) if more people had had that app though, they would have got one last free coffee in finished a couple of emails and had a chat to their mate and got the one after the delayed one; instead of dashing for a train that wasn't going to show up yet anyway. In Fact, I'd assume that that's probably the case now, i just haven't been a voice engineer for so long I haven't even been inside an office in London in 5 years i dont think.

Anyway, hope those slightly rambling examples might be some help, the blackboard one I chose as a platform because it's in so many universities and i think hourbike run the bikeshare services in quite a few places so it's a national example.

Oooh, you could have buttons near points of interest that tell you where the nearest bike is and how to get to it when you press them, that's smart city stuff, seems to be the hip thing to do so maybe the publicity of having a 'smart city' bikeshare tool which " was made possible by hourbike's forward thinking open API strategy" would be a winner.

[jamieisboss]

http://www.travelspirit.io/resources/

led me to

https://github.com/luqmaan/awesome-transit

which in turn sent me to

https://github.com/eskerda/pybikes

and so

http://www.citybik.es/#about

maybe that'll help

[futuretap]

I'd love to access Liverpool's City Bikes as an open data feed, preferably using GBFS. We'd like to integrate it into our Where To? app to provide bike directions using shared bikes.