Lockdown and Bikeshare

I earlier this week spoke at a Cycling@Tea-Time seminar, on the impact of lockdown on bikeshare, looking at London, the UK, and the world in general. The talk was based on some very preliminary crunching through some CDRC datasets to see how usage has changed, both in volume and time-of-day, for how people are using bikeshare systems.

I also offered some thoughts on bikeshare’s role in a post-lockdown world, where social distancing concerns about public transport may result in a spike in bikeshare usage but also more congestion.

The talk also paid tribute to Russell Meddin, the “godfather” of bikeshare, who sadly passed away last month.

I met up with Russell regularly over the last 10 years to talk bikeshare, and we would typically spend hours over a hot chocolate, catching up on what was happening in the industry, in the USA, the UK and elsewhere. Russell also was the driving force behind many of the changes to Bike Share Map I made over the years. He will be greatly missed.

Amongst many other societal contributions, Russell spent the last 11 years curating the Bike-Sharing World Map, a huge Google Maps site showing the latest news and status of around 2100 active bikeshare systems around the world, along with notes on the 400 proposed and 500 closed systems.

There is no other resource that comprehensively maps bikeshare throughout the world, including my own Bike Share Map that only shows the larger systems with live data. I am sure I am not alone in wanting this resource to live on and continue to be the definitive source of bikeshare’s world “footprint” and would like to explore some ideas about this could happen.

My talk only touched about the impact of lockdown and there is much data that needs to be crunched so I am hoping to spend further time on looking at this shortly.

My presentation: