Show HN: I visualized the entire history of Citi Bike in the browser

#1

Post by freemanjiang » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

Each moving arrow represents one real bike ride out of 291 million, and if you've ever taken a Citi Bike before, you are included in this massive visualization!

You can search for your ride using Cmd + K and your Citi Bike receipt, which should give you the time of your ride and start/end station.

Everything is open source: https://github.com/freemanjiang/bikemap

Some technical details: - No backend! Processed data is stored in parquet files on a Cloudflare CDN, and queried directly by DuckDB WASM

- deck.gl w/ Mapbox for GPU-accelerated rendering of thousands of concurrent animated bikes

- Web Workers decode polyline routes and do as much precomputation as possible off the main thread

- Since only (start, end) station pairs are provided, routes are generated by querying OSRM for the shortest path between all 2,400+ station pairs

Show HN: I visualized the entire history of Citi Bike in the browser
bikemap.nyc

Re: Show HN: I visualized the entire history of Citi Bike in the browser

#2

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I visualized the entire history of Citi Bike in the browser

#3

Post by ge96 » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

How was the data gathered? They just publicly show the bike's locations?

Re: Show HN: I visualized the entire history of Citi Bike in the browser

#4

Post by RIMR » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 9:51 PM UTC

ge96 wrote: post #3

How was the data gathered? They just publicly show the bike's locations?

https://bikemap.nyc/about

Re: Show HN: I visualized the entire history of Citi Bike in the browser

#5

Post by IvoCrnkovic » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 9:51 PM UTC

I've seen many visualizations of the citibike data over the years, this is one of the most charismatic for sure!

Re: Show HN: I visualized the entire history of Citi Bike in the browser

#6

Post by ge96 » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

RIMR wrote: post #4

ge96 wrote: post #3

How was the data gathered? They just publicly show the bike's locations?

https://bikemap.nyc/about

That's cool it actually came from citibike

Re: Show HN: I visualized the entire history of Citi Bike in the browser

#7

Post by wiredfool » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 10:06 PM UTC

Interesting that citibike publishes trip level data. The bike share schemes in Dublin only publish station counts or free bike locations. So you can see the overall pattern of bike motion, but there’s no way to see how many north side trips go to the docks vs Heuston station vs the city center.

Re: Show HN: I visualized the entire history of Citi Bike in the browser

#8

Post by 7777777phil » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 10:13 PM UTC

This is just so cool! Not much more to add. Thanks a lot for sharing!! Great work :)

Re: Show HN: I visualized the entire history of Citi Bike in the browser

#9

Post by leros » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 10:27 PM UTC

How is MapBox going for this free tool? Is it costing you money?

Re: Show HN: I visualized the entire history of Citi Bike in the browser

#10

Post by gnfargbl » Wed, Jan 07, 2026, 10:40 PM UTC

It's often interesting to observe the different ways that privacy is approached in the US and Europe.

In Europe we often accept pretty grave restrictions of our liberty like the UK's Online Safety Act, which would never fly in the US, and we do so without much public comment.

On the other side of things, organisations in the US happily expose datasets like this one, which would give a most EU Data Protection Officers a heart attack, and nobody bats an eyelid.