bikemap.bcn
About
bikemap.bcn is a visualization of bike station activity of the past year or so of Bicing, the bike-sharing service of Barcelona.
Each colored dot represents one of the 544 bike docking stations, from information published by the City of Barcelona. The dot's color and size indicate the station's occupancy at a given time and a sublte 'pulse' animation indicates every time a station gains or loses a bike.
The simulation starts at 1x normal speed by default but you can change the date and time to the past and manipulate time in incremental steps.
Technical Details
- No backend — Processed data is stored in Apache Parquet files and queried by DuckDB WASM directly in the browser.
- GPU rendering — Deck.gl renders the station status visualization efficiently.
- Efficient Loading — Data is loaded incrementally to minimize bandwidth.
Limitations
While data is pulled in real time upon entry and constantly updates, there will be gaps in past data since the City only does monthly releases of datasets (i.e. the data for Today is displayed fine but the one from last week doesn't exist).
Some months are completely missing, as they are not provided. Hopefully, this will improve in the future 🤞
Why do it?
I made this as a fun weekend project, because I love this city and enjoy using Bicing myself 🚲