One bike, two bike, red bike, blue bike
Spring is finally here! To celebrate, we’ve built a Bike-Share API that allows you to query over 65 dockless and docked bike-share systems across the country through a single API. Like our Curbs API and Tolls API, the Bike-Share API is also free and open for anyone to use! Go ahead and add some outdoor, active transportation to your app so your users can get out there to enjoy the nice weather.
With Coord’s Bike-Share API, we save you the work of gathering data from all of the disparate GBFS feeds out there and standardizing the sometimes-not-so-standard data that they provide. Our Bike-Share API also provides system level information such as pricing, pass rules, and service areas that are important for helping users to pick the right transportation options. Ready to start building? Head on over to our guide page to see an interactive example that you can copy and build on.
In addition to finding bikes, our API can also facilitate transactions to check out bikes from the underlying bike-share systems. That’s right — you can rent and pay for a bike on behalf of your users with Coord’s APIs. If you’re interested in this feature, let us know.
So, why are we so excited about bike-share?
It takes cars off the road
Most one way car trips in dense urban areas are less than a few miles, making them excellent candidates for replacement with bikes. This is great for people, the environment, and the roads!
It’s faster
It’s often a much faster way of getting around our busy city streets. According to Todd Schneider, over 50% of peak hour taxi trips in NYC would be faster as Citi Bike rides.
More bikes → more usage → more bikes
One of the challenges with mass adoption of shared bikes is anxiety about being able to find a bike when and where you need one. We hope that by making bikes searchable across multiple operators, we can provide more options than any single operator can on their own, making bike-share a more viable option for a potential user.
With the proliferation of new bike share systems in cities, we hope to play a role in jumpstarting the flywheel of more bikes, followed by more usage, which in turn leads to greater demand for bikes and bike-related infrastructure. As more consumers discover the ever-increasing set of bike-share options in their cities and feel comfortable that there will always be available bikes nearby, we expect bike-share to become an integral part of the way we get around cities.
Using our API
We’ve built a step-by-step guide page that walks you through how to implement our API in a navigation context. The first step is, of course, to find available bikes across docked and dockless systems. The next is to direct your user to their destination using a bike-friendly route (leaning on Google Maps router for this). And then, finally, to understand the cost of any of the given options so that your users have full information in order to make the best choice for them.
We’re already seeing developers adopt Coord’s Bike-Share API to build new experiences that help users find the nearest bikes. Bike Hunt, an app for Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, helps users to find nearby bike-share options via voice. When you’re on the go you can quickly find the nearest bike without even taking your phone out of your pocket — something that can save you a real hassle in a city with multiple docked and dockless bike-share systems, such as Washington, DC.
Give it a try today by asking Google Assistant to “talk to Bike Hunt” or build your own experience on top of our APIs.
Please chat with us on coord.co to ask a question, suggest an idea or report a problem with our platform. We’d also love to hear from you if you’d like us to showcase your app that uses our APIs.
