Wednesday 29 October 2008

The good thing about rain...

Nobody is using bicing in the rain. But I expect the stations to fail again if the rain continues.

Friday 24 October 2008

[0810.4187] Bicycle cycles and mobility patterns - Exploring and characterizing data from a community bicycle program

[0810.4187] Bicycle cycles and mobility patterns - Exploring and characterizing data from a community bicycle program: "This paper provides an analysis of human mobility data in an urban area using the amount of available bikes in the stations of the community bicycle program Bicing in Barcelona. The data was obtained by periodic mining of a KML-file accessible through the Bicing website. Although in principle very noisy, after some preprocessing and filtering steps the data allows to detect temporal patterns in mobility as well as identify residential, university, business and leisure areas of the city. The results lead to a proposal for an improvement of the bicing website, including a prediction of the number of available bikes in a certain station within the next minutes/hours. Furthermore a model for identifying the most probable routes between stations is briefly sketched."

Bicing Tracker


Bicing Tracker
Originally uploaded by protozoo
protozoo has some very cool images of a software to track bicing usage over time online.

Thursday 23 October 2008

Friday 17 October 2008

Restablecido el servicio de Bicing en el 95 por ciento de las estaciones. europapress.es

Restablecido el servicio de Bicing en el 95 por ciento de las estaciones. europapress.es: "El servicio público de bicicletas de Barcelona, el Bicing, quedó esta tarde restablecido en el 95 por ciento de las estaciones de la ciudad después de que desde alrededor de las 11.45 horas de hoy sus usuarios no pudieran cogerlas, pero sí devolverlas." Seems like bicing broke down for nearly five hours today. I blame it on the torrential rain today. They blame it on Movistar.

Thursday 16 October 2008

B de bicing, B de bingo | despiertos

B de bicing, B de bingo | despiertos: "Este blog se inició con un post sobre bicing. Y hoy toca otro. Situación: cada día salgo del trabajo y me dirijo a la estación de Sants, en Barcelona. Andando tengo entre 10 y 15 minutos, según el estado de ánimo y las prisas. En bici unos 5 minutos menos. El caso es que tengo 4 paradas del Bicing de camino (6 si contamos las 2 que están en la misma estación). ." A bicing user describes his experience with bicing and documents the lack of available bicycles on his way to work. Some stations are empty, some contain bikes which are unavailable and some contain bikes which are locked with chains. I guess we have all been there. I am usually pretty lucky with my way to work and just have to pass one or two empty stations.

Tuesday 14 October 2008

Sustainable transport is on the rise in Barcelona

Sustainable transport is on the rise in Barcelona: "According to Mr Nadal, the growth in public transport use is explained by the 'l'increase in the public transport available'. He pointed to the success of the public cycle hire scheme Bicing, the fact the Metro runs throughout Saturday night and trains are more frequent, plus the start of the tram system."

Thursday 9 October 2008

finally some new stations

El Periodico also states that there will be 80 more stations for 2009, which will bring us up to 480. Currently we are at 375, as some stations were not available during the last months.
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  • Erasme de Jane
  • Carrer de Sant Pau
  • Bruc
  • Sardenya
  • Recinte Parc de la Ciutadella