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Bike Share

The Top 20 World Bikeshare Cities*

With NYC’s big bikeshare launching on Monday, it’s time to update my list of the world’s biggest systems.

* I’m only including the systems where there is publically accessible live (or near-live) data on the number of bikes available for use. This means that most of the large Chinese systems don’t appear – accurate and up-to-date numbers for many of them are hard to obtain, as they either never had live online maps, or, in several cases, the live running information from them has been recently removed. If they were included, and the data from press releases, news articles and other research sources were accurate, then Chinese systems would make up 17 of the top 20, including the top 4.

The Biggest Bike Sharing Cities with Live Bike Numbers (May 2013)

City Country Data Bikes
May 2011
Bikes
May 2012
Bikes
May 2013
1 Paris** France API 17875 (Dec) 18135+ 18380
2 London Great Britain API 4886 6603+ 8128+
3 New York USA Data* 4683
4 Barcelona Spain API 4993 4482 4303
5 Montreal Canada Data 4309 3943 3954
6 Zhongshan China Data n/a 2491 (Jun) 3919+
7 Brussels Belgium API 1833 (Jun) 2494+ 3723+
8 Lyon France API 3063 (Oct10) 3318+ 3411+
9 Mexico City Mexico Map 1129 1149 3408+
10 Milan Italy Map 1315 1559+ 2681+
11 Changwon South Korea Map n/a 2010 (Jun) 2527+
12 Valencia Spain API 2278 (Dec) 2444+ 2495
13 Nantong China Map n/a n/a 2487 (Jun)
14 Seville Spain API 1941 (Oct10) n/a 2312+
15 Toulouse France API n/a n/a 2091
16 Lille/Tourcoing France API 711 (Sep) 1336+ 1967+
17 Washington DC/Arlington USA Data 918 1402+ 1902+
18 Brisbane Australia 3P 1018 1623+ 1883+
19 Nice France Data 784 (Nov) 1361+ 1400
20 Minneapolis/St Paul USA Data 605 977+ 1392+
21 Taipei City Taiwan Data 336 (Jul) 310 (Mar) 1374+
22 Kaohsiung Taiwan Map n/a 992 (Jul) 1312+

The numbers are coming generally from the monthly recorded max from my Bike Share Map.
* API anticipated appearing soon.
** Not including 400 bikes from a couple of separate systems on the outskirts.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that some “official” information releases overstate the numbers of bikes available – operators may consider bikes that are in docks but broken, in a workshop for repair, or in redistribution vans, to be available for use, whereas I’m counting the maximum recent number of bikes available in docks for people to use at a particular instant. So, for consistency, I’m sticking to the raw statistics that I can see, for the list here.

(I know there’s 22, not 20. I initially missed out Taipei City by mistake, then didn’t have the heart to move out Kaohsiung. Then I found a new datasource for Nantong.)

7 replies on “The Top 20 World Bikeshare Cities*”

[…] El siguiente puesto es para Barcelona, con 4.303, seguido por Montreal (Canadá), con 3.954 bicis. Según lo previsto, Chicago y Los Ángeles piensan poner en marcha este servicio con 4.000 bicicletas cada uno en los próximos meses.  La lista completa de los 20 principales sistemas de alquiler de bicicletas de alquiler disponibles en el mapa está en este artículo del blog de O’Brien. […]

How can (planned) cities be placed on the top 20 ….shouldn’t they be left out until bikes are actually placed in those cities? I mean, we could start placing imaginary bikes for any city in the planet and say that I imagine that each inhabitant of a town with 300,000 inhabitants will have a bike and call it the world’s bike share capital, after all 🙂

Planned systems which are launching imminently (i.e. in the next couple of months) are in the list but don’t appear with a number beside them – they are there to illustrate where they will likely come, if they launch with the numbers of bikes promised. This often isn’t the case – Chicago will likely actually launch with only 700 bikes for Phase 1 so will be well outside the Top 10 after all – when it climbs back into it will depend how quickly the five phases pan out.

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