Revealing Paris Through
Velib’ Data
Velib is a community bicycle rental service in Paris (similar to the Vélo'v service in Lyon and Bicing in Barcelona). The stations deployed in the city offer bikes people can use for their small and medium daily routes within the city. As part our Tracing the Visitor's Eye project, and as follow-up to the work on Bicing in Barcelona, Mathieu Arnold granted us access to the infrastructure status (i.e. number of available bikes for each station) over several weeks. The resulting animation shows the spatio-temporal state of the system and the mobility patterns of its users. One intention behing these visualization is to explore how accumulated data can help people to grasp the availability and quality of the system over space and time (e.g. do not expect to encounter available bikes the different neighborhoods at certain hours). In addition we aim at revealing Paris, the life of its different neighborhoods, specific areas, their topologies and dynamics through its bike system.
The animation of these spatio-temporal data reveals the pulse of the Velib' system a full day (February 10, 2008) based on the number of bikes available at each station.
Fabien GirardinCopyright © 2008, Fabien Girardin