Bike Share? There’s an App for That

Reblogged from Open Transportation, May 9, 2013:

A recent Community Board 2 meeting proved that bike share is not for everyone. Sorry for the convenience, residents of SoHo, NoHo, and the Village. But for those of us who are upset that we (I) have to walk a whole block and a half to get to the nearest Citi Bike station, there’s good news! None of the program’s bikes are actually installed, but there is already an app for it!

Citi Bike is going to be the nation’s largest bike share program. Hoping to feed off of the success from other cities like Washington, DC and Miami, the 330 docking stations throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn will be up and running before you know it. While thousands have signed up for the program, not a single bike has been installed. Tom Claes of the Belgian mobile app company WebComrades knows that and has released the first bike share app anyway. His app, that will be available for iPhone and Android users, will plot users on a map and alert them to the nearest docking station. Based on the version he created for the city of Antwerp, which is one of the world’s most bike-friendly cities, the app will offer a bit more than Citi Bike’s official app, which is already available for download and will begin working when the program actually launches.

Perhaps the coolest function of Claes’ app is that users will be able to save their favorite stations and have the app tell them which are full and which are empty. This feature will alleviate the fear of many New Yorkers who have yet to sign up, and with the program already attracting a younger and more tech-savvy group of customers, this app is likely to be very popular.

So how did Claes make this app, you ask? According to Transportation Nation, “Using some clever data-scraping of the bare bones information on the Citi Bike NYC website, Claes pulls in the information about the docking stations and saves it to a constantly updating WebComrades server.” Apparently he has also been in touch with Citi Bike and plans to use their officially released data once it is made available. As we patiently await the bikes to be installed, we can be grateful for the city’s commitment to open data, and look forward to more, better, smarter apps that will help us navigate our newly shared streets.