Shutting down Indego+Status Board

February 2, 2017

While I was living in Philadelphia, the city launched a bike share program, Indego. I signed up early and used it regularly to get from my apartment in Society Hill to CityCoHo, where I was renting a desk.

I had played around with Status Board, but hadn’t had much of a use for it until I found the API for the status of the bike share stations. It didn’t happen often, but it was annoying to get to a station and find that there are no bikes to check out, or no docks available to return a bike.

Since I used the same stations regularly, it seemed like a good use case of Status Board: I could create a table showing the available bikes and docks for my favorite stations and check it whenever I was about to head out.

So I created Indego+Status Board.

I built the site using Flask. The index page calls the bike share API to create a map of stations. You can click on stations to add them to your list and then view them in Status Board or in the browser.

The data are collected the same way for both Status Board and the HTML view. The URL contains a list of station IDs as part of the query string. When the Flask route is called, it fetches the station data from the API, loops through the stations to find the ones with the right IDs and then renders a simple HTML table with the requested data.

The Status Board table has very little styling—the app has a table style already—just enough to align the blue and gray bars.

I used it pretty regularly, though, and it was useful for me. There were a couple of times that I could see that the station nearest my apartment was full, so I knew to use an alternate on my way home.

But then I moved out of Philly and Panic announced they were shutting down Status Board, so now seems like a good time to retire this project and save myself a few bucks a month by powering down the droplet¹.

The code is on GitHub if you’d like to run your own version. And it turns out that other bike share programs have data APIs, so it could be adapted. For instance:

• CitiBike (New York)
• Capital Bikeshare (Washington, D.C.)
• Santander Cycle (London)