Service message: Santander Cycles feed - back end system changes today

We are planning some changes to the back end systems for our cycle hire live availability feed today at around noon. Users should not notice any change to the content, format or latency of the cycle hire data in our API. If you do notice any issues, please email [email protected] or reply to this forum post and we will investigate as soon as possible. Please note there may be a 5-10 minute lag refreshing the data while we carry out the switchover.

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Hi everyone, we’re aware of a few issues with the new feed, notably that it’s no longer viewable in Chrome. This has something to do with Cloudflare duplicating the Content-Encoding header. Forcing Chrome to use an Accept-Encoding: text/xml header allows you to view the xml feed directly.

The other issue is the missing lastUpdate attribute located in the xml root. We’re using the Last-Modified header to identify changes instead.

However, I would highly recommend using the Bikepoint endpoint, which is a specialised version of the Place endpoint, there is no need to scrape the source data at this point.

https://api.tfl.gov.uk/bikepoint

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We discovered an issue with the Santander Cycles XML feed due to the back end system changes we put live today and have rolled back to the previous version. We are planning to make the change again on Monday 19th June. In the meantime, we urge all our open data users to use the fully supported Unified API /BikePoint endpoint to access Santander Cycles data not the legacy XML feed which we plan to decommission in the near future.

We have now successfully switched to the new cycle hire feed. Please post here if you spot any issues with your apps and we will investigate asap. Thanks!