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"Big data" from London’s Santander Cycles and New York’s Citi Bike has been made commercially available by Ito World. The Cambridge and London data visualisation specialist has also included other global bike-share schemes into the same real-time data feed.
The feed includes the locations of the bikes and docking stations in real-time. Providers of mobility solutions – such as multi-modal smartphone apps – can now more easily incorporate bike-share data.
Nice Ride Minnesota’s IT director Mitch Vars said: “Bike sharing has matured in recent years from something experimental to a key component of urban transportation in much of the world. Cooperation between companies like Ito World and the public and private operators of these systems is accelerating the adoption of bike sharing by new users."
He added: "Standardisation of bike-share data will unlock even greater potential as the mode continues to evolve.”
Ito World CEO Johan Herrlin said: “In the future, bike sharing will be one of the key parts in a smart, fully-connected transportation network that transforms how people move around a city. We hope that our global bike share data feed will help make it easier to connect potential users with bike share schemes around the world, ultimately getting more people on two wheels.”
The global bike share data feed will help cities and bike share operators promote the existence, location, and availability of bike share schemes, encouraging greater use and adoption, said a statement from Ito World.
Public bike sharing schemes now operate in over 1,175 cities globally, with a fleet of more than 2.2m bikes on the streets. Docked bike schemes – such as Vélib in Paris and "Sadiq Cycles" in London – have recently been joined by a new-wave of "dockless" bike-share schemes, many of them offshoots from Chinese university digital programmes.
