A Day in the Life of a Hubway


Hubway, Boston’s bikesharing system, launched a cool project this month by releasing a huge amount of data and challenging people to design cool ways to visualize it. There’s a Halloween deadline, but YouTuber Christos Nicolaides already uploaded his “day in the life” of Hubway bikes to YouTube. The video shows white dots, representing Hubway bikes, traveling against a black map of Boston, with a graph showing the volume of usage throughout the day.

The time-lapse confirms some things we’d have guessed intuitively: Hubway use spikes during rush hours and drops off rapidly after sun down. We were more surprised by the constantly high use that starts mid-afternoon, but then, having a day job, this writer doesn’t spend much time thinking about those people who aren’t in an office.

As more entries come in, we think there are going to be even cooler revelations. We’d love to see a week or a month in the life of a single Hubway bike. But in the meantime, enjoy: