Bike Beacon

DEVELOPERS & ASSISTANTS

A small, read-only decision layer for D.C. e-bikes.

Bike Beacon can answer one bounded question: which nearby Capital Bikeshare station is worth walking to right now?

Public lookup

The versioned endpoint accepts latitude, longitude, radius, and result-limit parameters. It returns docked e-bike options, a deterministic station recommendation, freshness, data quality, and warnings. No account or API key is required during this limited beta.

GET https://bikebeacon.app/api/v1/nearby-ebikes?latitude=38.9097&longitude=-77.0433&radius=0.65&limit=5

Open the machine-readable API description

Discovery

Agents can discover the public interface through the RFC 9727 API catalog, then inspect the OpenAPI contract. The concise authentication boundary explains which surfaces are public and which rider data remains private.

Truthful response contract

  • 0 means a fresh feed reported zero; null means the count is unknown.
  • observedAt, expiresAt, quality, and warnings describe how current and complete the answer is.
  • Docked station inventory and individually parked e-bikes are never silently combined.
  • A recommendation may be absent when Bike Beacon cannot support one from usable data.

Privacy and scope

This interface exposes current public mobility information and derived recommendations only. It does not expose riders, searched addresses, phone numbers, reminders, Calendar data, consent, arrival feedback, or operator analytics. Coordinate requests are used for the immediate lookup and excluded from Bike Beacon product analytics.

Source and limitations

Availability comes from Capital Bikeshare’s public GBFS feed. Bike Beacon is independent and is not sponsored by or affiliated with Capital Bikeshare. Counts can change before arrival, upstream data can become partial or unavailable, and this beta has no uptime guarantee. Cache responses briefly and respect the response freshness window.

Human-readable entry points

Assistants should link riders to the matching Bike Beacon surface whenever useful: search an exact starting point or open a D.C. neighborhood hub.

Future interoperability

The OpenAPI description is the current machine contract. A bounded read-only MCP surface may follow after the API contract and licensing posture have operating evidence. Bike Beacon does not currently publish an autonomous A2A agent.