The Civic Works team at OpenPlans just launched another sweet micro-site: cibi.me -- for NYC's forthcoming bike share program. The site is notable for a few reasons: First, it's beautiful and fun to use. The OpenPlans team has been putting out a ton of these small, beautifully designed and really fun sites recently (see change.st, beautiful.st), including the NYC Bike Share location suggestions map that got thousands of suggestions when it launched last year. A lot of the functionality you see here has been built into the open source Shareabouts app. Second, it's built on top of the OpenTripPlanner -- OTP is an open source, multi-modal trip routing engine that OpenPlans has been working on for a number of years now; originally built for the new TriMet system map, it's also been used in several other countries. Cibi.me represents one of the more creative ways to use OTP -- as an API which the site talks to via JS. OTP lets you do awesome stuff like use the "bike triangle" to prioritize between safety, speed and flatness. (note that this feature was originally developed by David Emory for the Atlanta A-TRAIN mobility map) Here is Frank Hebbert's write up on cibi.me on the OpenPlans blog. I am really impressed by and proud of the work that OpenPlans has been doing lately. They are on fire pumping out small, but beautiful, compelling and powerful apps.
