RUG shows live availability of public transport bicycles on map

The internet is teeming with open and freely available data, as is the number of public transport bicycles available at stations and other rental locations. This prompted the Geodienst of the University of Groningen to add an extra dimension to openov.nl’s public transport bicycle data: time.

The idea came to the fore after openOV tweeted on October 13th sent with the message ‘It’s been done! The @NS_online OV-fiets API!’ The tweet referred to a Google Groups conversation containing the link to the uncompressed public transport bicycle data that is refreshed every 15 minutes. Less than a month later, the NS processed the data itself in its Reisplanner Xtra app and since November 8, users of the app can see whether a steel steed is still available for rent. But all that open data is of course also good for data research. Or just for making a nice visualization.

That is what the Geodienst of the University of Groningen did. Their visualization not only shows the data clearly on a map, but also adds the dimension ‘course of time’. By registering the number of available bicycles every five minutes, beautiful visualizations can be made of the number of bicycles available per rental location, which, according to the service, is interesting for students to learn how to deal with data.

The map itself can be viewed at the Geodienst. To visualize the data, a javascript api from Arcgis is used and the site uses Highcharts to display the graph. Of course, there is also a Github page of the project.