A Real-Time Bike-Share Map for the Entire World

As of this moment – this moment being mid-afternoon on the U.S. East Coast – about 13,000 people were out riding bikes they'd checked out from 85 of the world's largest bike-share systems. Mexico City's network was the busiest. The young New York City system was finding its balance, with six bikes still on offer at the East 14th Street and Avenue B dock in Manhattan. Most of the systems in China, in the middle of the night, were quiet.

If you use a bike-share system, you likely rely on an app that gives you a real-time distribution of the bikes and empty docks in your area. Oliver O'Brien, a researcher with the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at the University College London, has built a map that does this same thing, simultaneously, for bike-shares all over the world.