Today saw the launch of Barclays Cycle Hire, London’s first public bike rental scheme. In keeping with the new spirit of open data, the locations of the docking stations (rental points) have been published via the London Datastore, along with a challenge for innovative uses.
The most obvious application of this data is to drive smartphone applications that cyclists can use on the move, and a number of iPhone and Android apps doing just this have already been announced. We reckon there’s also a good case to provide a fully-featured web map that can be used for journey planning and on higher-end smartphones with good browsers.
The official TfL website for the scheme already has a map of the docking stations, though we think (at the time of writing) it’s short of a few features. What better way to spend a Friday lunchtime than to load the data set into the geo.me platform and look at some of the features we think could be added.
Here’s our first pass at a London Cycle Hire map, with a few observations on what’s good and not so good below. Have a play yourself and let us know what you think.
What’s Cool?
Here are some of the options we configured that we think the official map might benefit from picking up on:
Fast visual information. We hear a lot of feedback on usability from our clients, and one trick we like to pull is to make the key information available with minimal interaction. For this map, we reckon that means the capacity of each station, so the numbers are shown on each marker. We also turned on the ‘fast tooltip’ so station names can be viewed by mouse-over rather than clicking.
Additional base maps. Andy Allan’s excellent OpenCycleMap seems like an obvious base map to make available, so we’ve added this as well as the classic OpenStreetMap tile layer as clickable alternative to the standard Google Maps.
‘Find my nearest‘. This form lets you enter an place/address/postcode and shows you where the nearest docking stations are.
Find by area. The TfL data set includes the district name as well as the unique location name for each docking station. We’ve applied this as a category filter on the right-hand side to enable browsing by area. This can be closed to expose more of the map.
Embedded Directions. You’re going to be travelling into town by train or tube, right, so why not include one-click directions to and from the closest train and tube stations? Click on any marker and get these from the second tab of the information bubble that opens.
StreetView. It hasn’t been updated (yet) to show the shiny new docking stations, but why not take a look at the area you’re going to be picking up the bike from? Fourth tab on the info bubble…
Clustering. We don’t think there are quite enough docking stations to warrant switching on marker clustering (see this demo for an example), but as the scheme expands in scope or density, this may well be required.
What’s Missing?
The official map of the docking stations has one huge advantage, which is that it has real-time data on the current availability at each docking station. As the Londonist points out, an API will likely become available to the rest of us in due course, so this should be addressed.
The map you see above also uses the Google Maps version 2 API. Like most web mapping APIs, this runs like an expensive brand of treacle on most handheld devices, thanks to all that JavaScript. The new version of the API went mainstream in May, however, and v3 is explicitly designed to play nice on all those iPhones, Androids and other smartphones with fast modern browsers. To make this map a realistic candidate for use on the move, it needs to be migrated to the faster API.
We’d contend that browser-based applications represent the long term future for mobile devices (apparently we’re not alone), though in the medium term it’s still the platform-specific apps that win. We’re also fascinated to see what effect tools like the forthcoming Android App Inventor will have on time-to-market for smartphone apps.
What’s Next?
Until a live API of locations and availability becomes available, we wouldn’t consider this map a production-ready service. One that happens, though, we’ll integrate the live feed and also port the setup over to Google Maps v3. Who knows, it might even help you get around town some day…