Bike Share Systems & Live Stations Scraper (GBFS)

Scrape official GBFS feeds from 1,500+ bike-share and micromobility systems worldwide — the system catalogue, real-time station availability (bikes, docks, occupancy, vehicle types) and pricing plans.

This actor reads the General Bikeshare Feed Specification (GBFS) feeds that operators publish themselves — the industry standard behind Citi Bike, Capital Bikeshare, Bicing, Vélib', nextbike, Call a Bike, BIXI, Oslo Bysykkel, Divvy, Bay Wheels and hundreds more. No API key. No login. No aggregator sitting in the middle.

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Why this actor (and how it differs from the CityBikes scraper)

There are two ways to get bike-share data, and they are not the same thing.

	This actor — bike-share-gbfs-scraper	citybikes-scraper
Data source	The official GBFS feeds published by the operator (auto-discovery gbfs.json → station_status, system_pricing_plans, …)	The CityBikes aggregator API, a third-party community project that re-publishes a normalised subset
Coverage	1,500+ systems in the MobilityData catalogue, including every system that ships a GBFS feed	Only what CityBikes has onboarded and keeps in sync
Freshness	Straight from the operator, ttl as low as 10 s	As fresh as the aggregator's own polling
Pricing plans	✅ system_pricing_plans (currency, price, taxable, description)	❌ not exposed
Vehicle types	✅ per-station e-bike / cargo / classic breakdown	❌ only a total bike count
Operator metadata	✅ operator, timezone, phone, e-mail, purchase URL, licence, start date, published feed list	Limited
Spec fidelity	GBFS v1, v2 and v3 (incl. the v3 field renames)	Aggregator's own flat schema

Rule of thumb: use citybikes-scraper when you want one quick, uniform bike-count feed. Use this actor when you need the authoritative operator data — the systems CityBikes misses, plus vehicle types, pricing and full real-time dock status. Many teams run both and reconcile.

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What you get

Mode systems — the catalogue

Every bike-share system in the MobilityData GBFS registry with operator metadata and a live station count.

{
  "type": "system",
  "system_id": "bike_barcelona",
  "name": "Bike Barcelona",
  "operator": null,
  "country_code": "ES",
  "location": "Barcelona",
  "timezone": "Europe/Madrid",
  "url": "https://www.bicing.barcelona/",
  "email": "mobility-data-client@lyft.com",
  "gbfs_version": "3.0",
  "auto_discovery_url": "https://barcelona.publicbikesystem.net/customer/gbfs/v3.0/gbfs.json",
  "feed_names": ["station_information", "station_status", "system_information", "system_pricing_plans", "vehicle_types", "..."],
  "station_count": 542,
  "source": "gbfs",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-28T18:11:52+00:00"
}

Mode stations — live availability

station_information joined with station_status on station_id, so every row carries both the static location and the real-time counts.

{
  "type": "station",
  "system_id": "oslobysykkel",
  "system_name": "Oslo Bysykkel",
  "station_id": "YOS:Station:6026",
  "name": "Østbanehallen",
  "address": "Jernbanetorget 1",
  "latitude": 59.9104991,
  "longitude": 10.7505055,
  "capacity": 35,
  "is_virtual_station": false,
  "bikes_available": 7,
  "bikes_disabled": null,
  "docks_available": 22,
  "docks_disabled": null,
  "is_installed": true,
  "is_renting": true,
  "is_returning": true,
  "occupancy_pct": 20.0,
  "vehicle_types_available": [
    { "vehicle_type_id": "YOS:VehicleType:bike", "count": 7 },
    { "vehicle_type_id": "YOS:VehicleType:ebike", "count": 0 }
  ],
  "last_reported": "2026-07-28T18:03:48+00:00",
  "source": "gbfs",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-28T18:12:34+00:00"
}

Mode pricing — pricing plans

{
  "type": "pricing_plan",
  "system_id": "nextbike_wr",
  "system_name": "WienMobil Rad",
  "plan_id": "Rate0571",
  "name": "Pay as you go: € 0,75 / 30 min",
  "currency": "EUR",
  "price": 0,
  "is_taxable": false,
  "description": "EUR 0.75/30min, EUR 19.00/24h",
  "source": "gbfs",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-28T18:13:39+00:00"
}

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Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	select	systems	systems (catalogue + metadata), stations (live availability), pricing (pricing plans)
systemIds	array	5 verified IDs	GBFS system IDs exactly as in systems.csv. Leave empty to sweep the whole 1,500+ catalogue.
countryFilter	string	–	Optional 2-letter ISO code, e.g. DE, US, FR
maxItems	integer	500 (max 5000)	Row cap. In stations/pricing the budget is split fairly across the selected systems

The five default system IDs are all verified live: bike_barcelona (GBFS 3.0), lyft_nyc (Citi Bike, 2.3), cabi (Capital Bikeshare, 2.3), nextbike_wr (WienMobil Rad, 2.3), oslobysykkel (3.0).

{
  "mode": "stations",
  "systemIds": ["bike_barcelona", "lyft_nyc", "cabi", "nextbike_wr", "oslobysykkel"],
  "maxItems": 1000
}

Sweep an entire country instead:

{ "mode": "systems", "systemIds": [], "countryFilter": "DE", "maxItems": 300 }

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Use cases

• Mobility research — build longitudinal datasets on shared-micromobility supply, fleet mix (e-bike vs classic) and system growth across cities and countries.
• City dashboards — power a live map of every dock in your city with bikes, free docks and occupancy percentage, refreshed as often as the operator's ttl allows.
• Travel apps — show travellers whether there are bikes at the station next to their hotel, in any of 1,500+ systems, without integrating 1,500 different APIs.
• Rebalancing analytics — poll stations on a schedule and detect the docks that run empty or jam full, the classic input for fleet-rebalancing and demand models.

Also good for: transport-planning consultancies, urban-mobility startups doing competitive coverage analysis, academic transport labs, insurance and fleet pricing, and open-data portals.

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Pricing

Pay-per-result: ~$0.5 per 1,000 results. A default stations run over the five verified systems (~5,300 stations) lands around $2.65. A systems sweep of one country is usually well under a dollar.

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How it works

1. Download the MobilityData catalogue systems.csv (verified header: Country Code, Name, Location, System ID, URL, Auto-Discovery URL, Supported Versions, Authentication Info URL, Authentication Type, Authentication Parameter Name).
2. Filter by systemIds / countryFilter; systems whose feeds require an API key are flagged and skipped.
3. For each system, fetch the auto-discovery gbfs.json and resolve the feed list with a tolerant resolver that handles both real-world shapes: data.feeds directly (GBFS v3) and data.<lang>.feeds where the language key may be en, de, fr, nb, … (GBFS v1/v2).
4. Fetch the feeds the mode needs, normalise and push in batches of 50.

Versions handled in the wild: GBFS 1.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.0, 3.1-RC3 and a handful of v1.0 producers that omit the version field entirely (Vélib' Métropole). The actor normalises the v3 renames — num_vehicles_available → bikes_available, num_vehicles_disabled → bikes_disabled — and flattens the v3 localised name / short_name / operator / description lists ([{"text": …, "language": …}]) back into plain strings.

Resilience. Feeds are hosted by the operators themselves, so some are always down. A failing system produces a warning and is skipped — the run continues. The actor only raises if zero items were produced across all selected systems.

Nulls are honest. A station whose station_status feed is missing gets null availability, never a misleading 0. occupancy_pct is null when capacity is 0 or unknown.

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Related actors

• CityBikes Bike Sharing Scraper — the aggregator-based counterpart described above
• Public Transit Scraper — stops, routes and departures for public transport networks
• EV Charging Stations Scraper — charge points, connectors and live status
• Airports & Airlines Scraper — airport, airline and route reference data

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Legal

GBFS feeds are published by operators as open data, usually under CC0 or a comparable open licence, precisely so that third parties can build on them. This actor reads those public endpoints, sends no credentials and collects no personal data — only infrastructure and fleet information. Check the individual system's license_url before redistributing its data commercially.

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Support

Found a system that will not resolve, or want another GBFS feed (free_bike_status/vehicle_status, geofencing_zones, system_alerts) added? Open an issue on the actor page.