Visualizing the use of Le vélo Star
Sunday, March 7th, 2010Le vélo Star is a public bicycle rental service provided by Keolis for the city of Rennes and it opened last year. At first, data were not provided officially, although one could look at the source of their google maps use to see that a list of station was available as a XML file and detailed informations were in HTML fragments. However, Rennes Métropole has decided to open up its data and the first step in this direction was done early this week by Keolis Rennes providing an API for Le Vélo Star.
So, I wanted to do something with it. Building a google maps stye application would have been easy but I tried for something different. I first started by building a script that would collect and store the data (number of bikes and slots available for each station) using RRD. Graphs are nice, but it wasn’t helping much seeing the whole picture. So instead, using a background image generated from OpenStreetMap I built a time-lapse animation of the stations’ usage.
All the code I wrote is available on my Github repository, except for the animation bit, were I currently used iMovie.