Bicing Activity
Bicing is a community bicycle rental service in Barcelona (similar to the Vélo'v service in Lyon and Vélib' in Paris). The stations deployed in the city offer bikes people can use for their small and medium daily routes within the city (max 30min). As part our Tracing the Visitor's Eye project, we collected minute-by-minute data on the infrastructure status (i.e. number of available bikes for each station) over a weekend. The resulting animation shows the spatio-temporal state of the system and the mobility patterns of its users. For instance, it reveals a quantity of “cyclists” hanging out at the beach on Sunday afternoon and then returning downtown in the evening (video below).
Nothing surprising here. But one idea behind that is that this kind of accumulated data can help people to grasp the availability and quality of the system over space and time (e.g. do not expect to encounter available bikes in the Eixample neighborhood on a sunny sunday or it is hard to return from the beach in the evening).