The latest neat mashup using Capital Bikeshare data tells you how often a station has a bike or a free dock available:

Hackers from Code for DC created this tool using publicly available data on CaBi availability.

As you might expect, it becomes hard to get a bike at stations in residential areas outside the core toward the end of rush hour, and hard to get a dock downtown at the same time. The pattern reverses itself in the evening.

It looks like some of the data might need cleanup in some way. For example, the station at Pennsylvania Avenue and Branch Avenue SE, in Ward 7, is almost always red (unavailable) but lime green if you select just “summer.” I suspect that means the station was just offline for a while during this period.

At the edges of the system, like in Alexandria, there are always bikes and docks.

What do you notice?

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.