Long ago I wanted to build an app for the local bike sharing system in my city, only to realize open data was not publicly available. Out of frustration, I built a free and open API for others to create applications, visualizations and research using bike sharing data.
Fast forward today and thanks to the community, the CityBikes project supports more than 800 cities all around the world and our API powers bike sharing transportation apps across all platforms.
Even with the introduction of open data standards like GBFS (at this time, approx 60% of our feeds) there's a fair amount of systems that are not accessible outside of their apps. The reality of open data shatters once you look too close into it: cursed APIs, broken feeds and HTML tables.
Our mission is to change that by providing developers, researchers and organizations the tools and resources to bridge this gap.
In this talk, I’ll share the motivations behind the project, what it’s like to maintain it after more than a decade, and dive into the new tools and historical data systems we’re building.