I got frustrated with my city's bike-share system, so I started building a data project
Hi everyone 👋
This project actually started with frustration.
I use Zaragoza’s bike-sharing system quite often, and I kept running into the same problem: stations would be empty when I needed a bike, or completely full when I wanted to return one. It often felt like the distribution of bikes across the city was inefficient.
At some point I started wondering: is the system really inefficient, or does it just feel that way?
That curiosity led me to start a small side project called BiziData.
The idea is simple: take the open data from the bike-sharing system and turn it into something easier to explore. Instead of raw datasets, I wanted to visualize how the system behaves in real time and over time.
Right now the project focuses on:
• station availability
• usage patterns
• system imbalances across the city
The goal is to better understand how people actually move around the city and what patterns emerge from the data.
What makes the project interesting to me is that many bike-sharing systems run on similar infrastructure (for example Lyft-operated systems), so the same approach could potentially be applied to other cities as well.
Right now this is still an exploration / side project, but I'm curious where it could go.
I'd love feedback from the community:
What mobility metrics would you find interesting to analyze?
Are there cities whose bike-share data would be interesting to compare?
Any ideas for making insights from this kind of data more useful?
If you're curious, here's the repo:
https://github.com/gcaguilar/bizidashboard
Thanks!
