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*”
[…] the “Boris Bikes” today, aka the Barclays Cycle Hire. The London bikeshare system, the second largest in the western world after Paris’s Velib, will be rebranded as Santander Cycles, and the bikes with have a new, […]
[…] i dati per molti programmi cinesi. O’Brien ha però rivelato che in Cina sono presenti 17 dei 20 più estesi e completi sistemi di bike sharing al mondo (come quello di Canton di cui abbiamo parlato nell’articolo Cina: il piu grande bike […]
In “Castellon de la Plana” city, we also have a bikeshare system. Can you please add it in your map?
– Map of the citie: http://bicicas.es/mapa.pdf
– Real time state: http://bicicas.es/estado/EstadoActual.asp
– Contact: bicicas at bicicas dot es
– Android APP: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=es.terrik.BicicasClient
I don’t know if there is an API.
Hi Castelloner. I’ve added in both Castellon and Leon now. Locations came from the app, plus some manual updates I made. http://bikes.oobrien.com/castellon/ and http://bikes.oobrien.com/leon/ Enjoy!
[…] 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.