CaBi

My Capital Bikeshare key fob stopped working a couple weeks ago. This was perhaps not too surprising following a grueling 18 months on my keyring. After calling to request a new one, I identified the problem -- the two halves of the plastic shell had become slightly separated at one end, and the little RFID chip had come loose and was sliding around inside. Here's what the little guy looks like:

I don't actually know anything about RFID, but it looks like the chip itself is the encased in that little bubble; there are wires running around the perimeter of the square that probably serve as the antenna.

CaBi continues to be awesome, as I've written previously. This seems like a good time to mention some stats available from my account, which shows that I've taken 245 trips since becoming a member in October 2010 -- about one every other day. The system tracks data on your 200 most recent trips (for me, that's trips since January 18, 2011). Here are some summary stats on those:

• 240.34 miles traveled. However, they measure this using as-the-crow-flies distances between the stations, so the actual distance will almost certainly be longer -- for instance, my route from the station nearest home to the station nearest the office is 3.3 miles, but CaBi counts this as 2.5 miles. If we assume this ratio holds true across all trips, I've probably covered about 320 miles on the CaBi bikes in the past 13 months. (That's similar to the distance covered in my bike trip to Pittsburgh.)
• 10,334 estimated calories burned. That's based on CaBi's assumption of 43 calories per mile.
• 1 day, 12 hours, 47 minutes and 48 seconds of riding.
• If you take the time elapsed and my estimated distance above, it indicates an average speed of about 8.7 mph. Given traffic lights and the conservative gearing of the bikes, that sounds about right.

There's lots of really interesting analysis to be done with data that CaBi recently released, which anonymously show all individual trips taken on the system during certain periods.