A bike sharing platform developed by the Open Bike Initiative, designed to alleviate last mile issues for employers.
This project is a online platform for managing a small to medium size bike share program. It creates a webserver that allows users to signup via email, then use SMS messaging to find out codes to unlock 4 digit tumbler U-locks (such as this).
Additionally, it includes features for repair reporting and checkout location reporting.
This code base has been successfully deployed as part of the following community bike share programs:
- Westside Bike Share Pilot by the Westside Transportation Alliance in Portland, OR.
These instructions will outline the infrastructure you will need to successfully use this project.
Managing a bike share is no mean feat, there is quite a lot of work involved in managing a fleet of bicycles. Repair and maintenance, load balancing, technical troubleshooting, just to name few. If you are feeling up to the task and would like to use this service. Here are the things you will need:
- Bikes
- 4 digit tumber locks for each bike (like this)
- A Twillo account
- A MailGun account
- A Heroku account
- A Mlab account
- A Github account
Besides the fixed costs of bikes and locks, you should also consider sinage to put up around you bike share to explain how to use the system to your users.
For the technology side, you will have variable costs from using the twilio service. Each text message sent by the system has a cost based on the twilio rates as well as a recurring cost of holding a telephone number for your system. The other recurring cost is the use of a Heroku hobby level dyno. At the time of this writing the cost is $7 a month.
Once you are ready to start the setup process check out the Setup Guide.
To Do - If you are interested in working with this code directly, please PM me on github.
- Add test suite
- Node - The server
- Express - The Web Framework
- Mongoose & MongoDb - Database storage
- Passport - User auth
- EJS - Templating Engine
- Mailgun - Mailing service
- Twilio - Messaging Service
This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details
- This code is designed after a similar system built by the Open Bike Initiative for their 2013 Bike Pilot.