[HN Gopher] Show HN: I visualized the entire history of Citi Bik...
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Show HN: I visualized the entire history of Citi Bike in the
browser
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
Author : freemanjiang
Score : 22 points
Date : 2026-01-07 18:57 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bikemap.nyc)
(TXT) w3m dump (bikemap.nyc)
| ge96 wrote:
| How was the data gathered? They just publicly show the bike's
| locations?
| RIMR wrote:
| https://bikemap.nyc/about
| ge96 wrote:
| That's cool it actually came from citibike
| IvoCrnkovic wrote:
| I've seen many visualizations of the citibike data over the
| years, this is one of the most charismatic for sure!
| nadis wrote:
| +1 to this comment! I used to work in this space and have
| similarly seen many projects and professional attempts at
| visualizing this kind of trip data.
|
| This is beautifully done!
| wiredfool wrote:
| Interesting that citibike publishes trip level data. The bike
| share schemes in Dublin only publish station counts or free bike
| locations. So you can see the overall pattern of bike motion, but
| there's no way to see how many north side trips go to the docks
| vs Heuston station vs the city center.
| 7777777phil wrote:
| This is just so cool! Not much more to add. Thanks a lot for
| sharing!! Great work :)
| leros wrote:
| How is MapBox going for this free tool? Is it costing you money?
| gnfargbl wrote:
| It's often interesting to observe the different ways that privacy
| is approached in the US and Europe.
|
| In 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.
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(page generated 2026-01-07 23:00 UTC)