So, the Citibike program has been running for a bit. I like the idea, but I have some reservations – it’s great for getting around in the zone - I’ve been using it for short shopping trips - run cross town to Fairway or take a quick trip from work to Porto Rico Importers or Rocco’s Pastries. On the other hand, the zone doesn’t get to the residential neighborhoods of upper Manhattan or the boroughs and the price per day is way too expensive for regular working class joes, particularly on top of a subway trip.

In any event, I was curious about station use patterns. Cool thing is that you can get live data from here. This was a great opportunity to play with some tools to see if I want to use them in class next year. In particular, backbone.js and d3.js.

So, I’m grabbing the station data every 5 minutes, storing it in a Mongo database, and threw together a little map and graph app:

You can check it out here.

The code is up on GitHub: citibike-1.

I might play around and add more graphs as I collect more data or maybe I’ll just move on to the next project.