Nicheloom visits: 58,094 all-time · 7,637 in the last 7 days

The opportunity tracker for new startups.

Today: 1,953 launches · Niche of the day: specialized calculation tools · See what launched today →

I visualized the entire history of Citi Bike in the browser

Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.

Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.

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

HN · launched Jan 7, 2026 · 113 upvotes (top 9%) · 0 views

Niche: data and scientific visualization tools · 146 launches, 3 in the last 7 days ▼ -50% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Analytics & BI
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 146 launches in data and scientific visualization tools →

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 : 82 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #9 of 83 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 21 days after the earliest competitor.

Related data

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.