In this post I reveal a little secret about Newcastle’s now defunct cycle hire scheme and make the cycle location data collated over two years available.

Until the end of 2013 Newcastle had a cycle hire scheme called Scratch Bikes operated by Grand Scheme (formally both WhipBikes Ltd and Scratchbikes Ltd). Back in 2011 I decided to use the cycle location information on the Scratch Bikes web site to make an amazing animation like the animation done using data from the Boris Bikes in London. Sadly I found that the data was anything but live so I could not.

When I pointed out the web site and phone app were inaccurate Scratch Bikes were quite honest and came clean that the numbers were in fact entered manually when the bicycles were checked at the start of the day. I did offer to help link the systems together but sadly they did not respond to my offer. They did however try and hire a friend instead but I guess they had their reasons.

So the data…. In 2011 I set up a server intermittently checking the Scratch Bikes web site to find out how many cycles were at each station. As mentioned the data only changed once a day and was not enough for my needs, but I had already coded up the scraper to discover this so decided to leave it running just in case it was useful. This ran continually for 2 years. I do not know if it is useful.

You can download the Scratch Bikes Usage Data here. The time stamp is from the site and appears to be the time when the data was entered on to there system. There is a separate table with the location information in. One note is that I do not have the official data for Malcolm Street and Cuthbert House (presumed to be 3400 and 3405) so I have made a best guess. If you can fill in the blanks then please get in touch. Please take the data and do cool things with it, and let me know what you do with it.

I will just close by saying that reimplementing the phone service and building a web service is not hard for someone like me to do. In fact I can have it up and running within a couple of weeks, the web site and app will be live and accurate, and you would be able to book out cycles by text, voice, from a smart phone, and a PC as well. If someone wants to team up make this happen again in Newcastle then get in touch.

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