https://www.alexandraulsh.com/dc-micromobility-by-neighborhood/
Explore Washington, DC micromobility services by DC neighborhood clusters.
Toggle different micromobility service providers using the left-hand menu.
Mouse over a DC neighborhood to see micromobility availability.
When viewing Capital Bikeshare layers, zoom in to see points for bikeshare stations. Mouseover a station to see the station name, available bikes and docks, disabled bikes and docks, and station capacity.
When viewing scooter layers, zoom in to see points for scooters. Disabled scooters are gray.
DC neighborhood clusters come from the District of Columbia's Office of the Chief Technology Officer's DC Open Data Portal. The government of DC does not provide official neighborhood polygons. Instead, they provide neighborhood cluster polygons.
The District Department of Transportation (DDOT) maintains a list of active public dockless micromobility (including bikeshare and scooter) APIs in Washington, DC.
Capital Bikeshare provides a General Bikeshare Feed Specification (GBFS) JSON API. Station capacity information comes from the station information endpoint, while live station availability information comes from the station status endpoint.
Helbiz operates electric scooters and provides a GBFS API endpoint.
Spin operates electric scooters and provides a GBFS API endpoint. In August 2018, Spin ended its dockless bike program and switched to electric scooters.
These micromobility services currently operate in DC but do not allow cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) on their API endpoints despite being listed publicly on DDOT's website. While you can view these APIs anytime in a web browser or via a curl request, you can't use these APIs in client-side JavaScript.
In May 2020, Lime acquired Jump e-bikes from Uber. You can access live Jump e-bike data at https://data.lime.bike/api/partners/v1/gbfs/washington_dc/free_bike_status.json. Unfortunately, this API does not allow cross-origin resource sharing, so you can't use this API in other applications.
DDOT lists https://s3.amazonaws.com/lyft-lastmile-production-iad/lbs/dca/free_bike_status.json as a public API endpoint for Lyft scooters on its dockless API page. While you can view the API freely in a web browser or via a curl request, since this endpoint does not allow CORS, you can't use it in client-side JavaScript applications.
DDOT lists https://gbfs.bird.co/dc as a public API endpoint for Bird scooters on its dockless API page. Unfortunately, this API endpoint suffers from intermittent CORS errors.
While Razor is still listed on DDOT's dockless API page, it stopped operating in DC in March 2020.
Mobike left the DC market in July 2018. They never provided an official public API. There was an endpoint you could submit a POST request to, but it did not seem to be designed or intended for public use. You needed to set the Referer
and user-agent
headers to match a WeChat client.
Ofo left the DC market in July 2018. Ofo did not provide an API that could be securely used with client-side JavaScript. Their main API required authentication with an OTP code and authorization token.
DDOT DC provided an API endpoint but it was HTTP only. It also could not be used securely client-side.
All of the APIs used in this project are publicly available and listed on DDOT's dockless API page. While these APIs provide anonymized data, they still include unique identifiers for each vehicle. This project goes one step further and removes unique identifiers from vehicle data.