I visualized the entire history of Citi Bike in the browser
Details
- External ID
- 46530832
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I visualized the entire history of Citi Bike in the browser
- Website domain
- bikemap.nyc
- Launched
- Jan. 7, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 113
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.9104084321475626
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Each moving arrow represents one real bike ride out of 291 million, and if you've ever taken a Citi Bike before, you are included in this massive visualization!You can search for your ride using Cmd + K and your Citi Bike receipt, which should give you the time of your ride and start/end station.Everything is open source: https://github.com/freemanjiang/bikemapSome technical details: - No backend! Processed data is stored in parquet files on a Cloudflare CDN, and queried directly by DuckDB WASM- deck.gl w/ Mapbox for GPU-accelerated rendering of thousands of concurrent animated bikes- Web Workers decode polyline routes and do as much precomputation as possible off the main thread- Since only (start, end) station pairs are provided, routes are generated by querying OSRM for the shortest path between all 2,400+ station pairs
Enrichment
- Theme
- Vertical
- Logistics
- Function
- Analytics & BI
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- citi bike history visualization
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Visualizing 291 million bike rides with instant receipt search requires high-performance geospatial data tiling and specialized GPU-based browser rendering.
What it would actually take: Building this requires processing terabytes of Citi Bike trip records into temporal vector tiles with specialized compression and spatio-temporal indices. The browser client relies on Deck.gl/WebGL instanced rendering and spatial query acceleration (like DuckDB-Wasm or KD-trees) to execute millisecond searches and animate massive particle counts smoothly.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Capital Bikeshare data, Lime/Bird scooter data, Car2Go (car-sharing service), MapLibre GL
Concerns raised: Data starts Jan 1, 2025, not entire history as claimed, Routes computed via OSRM shortest path are directionally correct but inexact, Slow rides appear as very slow in animation rather than detecting detours/stops, No visibility into how many rides excluded from dataset
Feature requests: Filter out walks-speed or slower rides, Allow searching stations with 'and' instead of '&' symbol, Show Lime/Bird scooter version of visualization, Include full GPS route paths instead of computed shortest paths
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 40 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #5 of 41 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 21 days after the earliest competitor.
- bikemap.nyc · hn · 2026-01-07 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.73
- I built Istanbul live transit map · hn · 2026-05-20 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Every MUNI, BART and Caltrain in SF on a Live Map · hn · 2026-08-15 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Explore the Silk Roads through an interactive map · hn · 2026-04-08 · 47 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Venice Echoes · ph · 2026-09-26 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Velunite · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- How many people live within an hour walk of you? · hn · 2026-07-28 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Remap · hn · 2026-08-26 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.38
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a analytics & bi tool for Legal yet.