In my never-ending quest to play around with cool data and shiny new software toys, I’ve taken my idea for a heat map of CitiBike locations and brought it into real-time. The map at the above link shows the real-time density of available bikes at the ~300 Citibike docking stations throughout New York City. If you’re on mobile, the map should still work, and will zoom to your location. To build this app, I used good old fashioned python (with the requests module) to grab the realtime JSON feed of station data that Citibike exposes. I then got nice n’ familiar with Flask, the awesome lightweight web app framework for python to deliver the data to a page running Mapbox’s javascript library with a leaflet heat map layer. Be sure to check out the code on github and check back on the map throughout the day to see how it changes. Cheers!

Recently I undertook a side project to try and create a weathermap-esque visualization of Citibike data. It all started when I got to wondering: Where do all the bicycles end up at the end of a busy week? All the code is freely available for your viewing pleasure as an iPython Notebook and on my GitHub page.