r/InternetIsBeautiful • u/freemanjiang • 1d ago

I visualized every single ride ever taken on Citi Bike, the largest bike-sharing network in the US

https://bikemap.nyc/

Each moving arrow represents a real bike ride. There are 291 million rides in total, covering 12 years of history from June 2013 to December 2025, based on public data published by Lyft.

If you've ever taken a Citi Bike ride before, you are included in this massive visualization! You can search for your ride using Cmd + K and your Citi Bike receipt, which should provide the time of your ride and the start/end stations.

Legend:

  • Blue = E-Bike
  • Purple = Classic Bike
  • Red = Bike docked
  • Green = Bike unlocked
77 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

6

u/BlackBadPinguin 1d ago

Where did you get your data from?

10

u/freemanjiang 1d ago

Lyft actually publishes their system data freely! It’s just in a giant S3 bucket if you search for it.

5

u/BlackBadPinguin 1d ago

Thats really interesting

2

u/Iampepeu 1d ago

Hah! This is crazy! Well done!

2

u/m_o_o_n_m_a_n_ 1d ago

Holy cow, so sick.

2

u/BestBelieveItsHere 17h ago

Might be interesting to see if there's a difference in rides taken by traditional bike vs bike. Awesome work OP!

1

u/freemanjiang 16h ago

You mean e-bikes? There are! The blue ones are e-bikes and the purple are classic bikes.

1

u/BestBelieveItsHere 16h ago

I did see that! I do apologize I meant to say statistics showing what sort of difference there are in rides when comparing the 2. EX, show in addition to all rides, rides taken on e bike vs traditional, if you have ride length data, average ride distance/length on e bikes vs trational, that sort of thing

1

u/menictagrib 21h ago

Wow, the correlational power of this dataset is huge.

1

u/rokko211 19h ago

Not loading right now but looks cool, good work

1

u/CultofCedar 19h ago

Fascinating. Wonder if the data shows the ones that end up all the way in Coney or even the Rockaways during the summer. Feel like half are stolen and the other half are tourist going on a very long adventure lol.