The animation below shows the real-time behaviour of hire bikes in London on October 4th 2010, the day of a major tube strike, and the busiest day for the scheme to date.

Departure times and journey durations are real; routing is calculated from OSM data; average speed from journey duration and route length.

In the visualization, the fixed circles represent stands – when a stand flashes red, it means that one or more bikes have left it – and a yellow flash means a bike has arrived. The bikes themselves are represented by the Boris Barclays Blue Tadpoles whizzing around – leaving at the right time, travelling at their correct average speed, and taking a (generally) realistic route.

The movie was created by Martin Austwick, here in CASA with the help of Ollie O’Brien (again CASA) for collection and routing.