After exploring what the city of Brussel is exposing in its open data platform I decided to do something with the data on the Villo bikes. Villo is a local bike sharing system by the city that allows you to take out a bike at one bike station and leave it at another. The Brussels open data platform has an endpoint that gives a live feed of the availability of each of the bike stations all over the city. I thought it would be interesting to visualize over time how the bike stations are being used. Therefore I set up a task on Amazon AWS that makes a request every 5 minutes to get a status on the availabilities and stores them in a database. I let it run for the night during rush hour from 15h30 till 22h.
In the visualization I displayed each of the bike stations on a map of Brussels as a dot. The size of the dot will be bigger depending on how many bikes are available.
More interesting would be if we could see what journeys are being made, i.e. an anonymized feed of bike journeys from point A to B at time T. Unfortenately I have had no response from the Brussels open data portal on the question if such data is being maintained.
We can however see already that during the timespan recorded bikes move from more professional areas in the city to residential areas in the city.