The dock board · bike share, read live
Every dock.
Bikes and spaces, now.
Pick a bike-share system — Citi Bike unless you say otherwise — and the board fills with every station it has: how many bikes are on the dock, how many spaces are free, and when the station itself last said so. The emptiest and the fullest are ranked at the top; the whole system is drawn as dots sized by capacity, coloured by state.
No key, no account, no server in the middle. The operators publish their feeds openly in the GBFS standard; this page reads the operator’s own file first and says so on the board. Where an operator’s host will not talk to a browser, it reads the CityBikes register instead — and says that too.
Citi Bike by default · any GBFS system by choice · the feed’s own timestamps · read in your browser
The board
Every station. Bikes one side, docks the other.
The figures are the system’s own, counted on this page from the file it has just read. The board re-reads itself every two and a half minutes while you watch, says when the feed stamped itself, and a press of the button reads it again on the spot.
Docks
waiting for the wire
Emptiest
stationbikesdocksfillreported
Fullest
stationbikesdocksfillreported
stationbikesdocksfillreported
Not read yet.
Systems
Any city that publishes its docks.
The register is CityBikes’ own list of bike-share systems, read when the page opens. Type a city, a country or an operator, or use the two selects. Where the register names the operator’s own GBFS feed the board reads that; where it does not, or the operator’s host refuses a browser, the board reads the register’s copy and labels itself accordingly.
The register
Reading the register…
The map
The system, drawn from the feed.
One dot per station, placed by the feed’s own coordinates and sized by its capacity. Red has no bike to take, amber no dock to return to, green has both and deepens as it fills; a faint dot is a station the operator has switched off. Click a dot and the board above reads that station.
Dock map
The dot with the ring is the station on the board. Bounds are the 1st and 99th percentile of the stations, so one mis-placed dock cannot shrink the city.
About
A board, not an app.
GBFS — the General Bikeshare Feed Specification — is how bike-share
operators publish their docks: a small directory file naming a
station_information file, which places and sizes each
station, and a station_status file, which says what is on
it this minute. This page reads both directly from the operator, in
your browser. Citi Bike’s status file is about a megabyte, so the
board polls it every two and a half minutes, only while the tab is
visible, and lets the browser revalidate with the file’s own
Last-Modified and ETag so an unchanged file
costs nothing to ask about.
The list of systems is the CityBikes register, api.citybik.es, read once per visit. Where it names an operator’s own feed the board prefers that and says so; where the operator’s host does not allow a browser to read it, the board reads the register’s copy of the stations and says that instead. The line under the system’s name always names what drew the board.
What the feed does not say, the board does not invent. Every station carries the time it last reported, printed as given; a station whose feed gives no time says so; a capacity the operator leaves blank is summed from the status file and labelled as summed; a feed that will not answer is reported as exactly that. Your chosen system is remembered in this browser and nowhere else. Questions to labs@labs.llc.