Disruptive Proactivity

Update: first map

It matters how you get from here to there. Today, The Boris Bike scheme in London is extended.

If you’re a cyclist, the safest way might get you the possibility of a fine, but the “right” way might be a death trap, meaning you never make it back to your family.

Boris bikers go from station to station, from dock to dock, and there is data for that.

TFL publish the stats of where the hires go from and to, but they don’t know the route taken. CycleStreets, from the Cambridge Cycle Campaign does routing and has an API.

Since the stations don’t move the routes can be published, but I’ve not seen them anywhere. So here’s a 1.4Gb zip file of them all. It includes all of the docking stations that had been marked operational by the 13th December (they’ve been coming online all week).

I hope to produce some heatmaps, of which routes are “recommended” between boris bike stations, and whether they happen to relate to dangerous spots.

In the interim, here’s the zip file, as there are lots of interesting things that can be done with it, and today’s likely a busy news day 🙂

(the scraper code to generate it yourself is also available from github)