Citybike Vienna ❤️ Warm Temperatures
I used Open Government Data to create a time-lapse video showing bike rentals from Vienna’s Citybike stations.
Intro:
Original Blog Post: Vienna ❤️ Citybikes @Medium
These rental bikes are available free of charge for one hour and are the most eco-friendly choice to travel through Vienna. And yes, they are more environmentally friendly than scooters, simply because they are powered by your feet rather than an electric engine. 😉
There are currently 121 bike stations across Vienna and they’re available 24/7. Stations have a limited number of available bikes and a limited number of available boxes. You can return your bike wherever you find a station with an available box and thus keep the sidewalks free from parked bikes.
Visualization:
Impressed by this service, I built an app to tell you more about bike rentals from Vienna’s Citybike stations. The app can be used to check any station for the current availability of bikes. In addition, it lets you visualize the utilization of all stations within the last hour. As basis for this, each station is visualized by a badge with two numbers:
Left: the number of available bikes | Right: the number of available boxes for returns
To show you this visualization in action, I created a video which shows bike rentals on a sunny and calm Saturday afternoon in Vienna in March 2019.
It visualizes data of an entire hour in less than 2 minutes:
Utilization analysis
Within only one hour, more than 700 bikes were borrowed.
At any given time, the most visited station is visualized at the top right. Hot spots like Museumsplatz have up to three rentals per minute, which essentially means that such stations are busy nonstop.
In addition to the number of rentals, the app visualizes the utilization of every Citybike station using a heat map. A dark red circle around a station indicates that there were 10 or more rentals or returns at that station within an hour. Telling by the heat map, almost all of the 121 stations were used quite frequently over this short period.
Download the free app
If you’d like to see this action for yourself and find out more, you can use my free app “Citybikes in Vienna” for an interactive time-lapse of Vienna’s Citybike rides. Or, if you feel like it, you can use this app to find your nearest Citybike station and start cycling yourself. 🚴♀️🚴♂️
