Category: Data

At the end of each year (normally between Christmas and New Year), there’s a lot to tidyup across Bike Share Map (BSM), the Meddin Bike-Sharing World Map (BSWM) and the UK Shared Micromobility Dashboard. This year, I’m aiming to document all the changes needed, roughly around the time that I make the changes.

Monday:

• Superpedestrian (aka LINK) have unexpectedly changed their URL prefix for their GBFS feeds from https://wrangler-mds-production.herokuapp.com/gbfs/{City}/{file}.json to https://mds.linkyour.city/gbfs/[2.2/]{a2}_{city}]/{file}.json. Superpedestrian run the Nottingham escootershare, the fifth largest city for the mode in the UK, so it’s good to have the live data back for that. They also run various other escootershares around the world.
• A number of the UK shared e-scooter trials ended at the end of November: Slough (Neuron), Canterbury (Bird), West Bromwich (Voi) and Sunderland (Neuron) – the last due to be replaced by a new Zwings fleet but this will not now launch until the new year – a significant service gap. The Neuron systems had open GBFS feeds (as does Newcastle, their last remaining UK one, although at the time of writing it is returning a 503 server error), so could be tracked live. Canterbury and West Bromwich unfortunately aren’t. I’ve stopped consuming the GBFS feed for Slough and Sunderland.
• In addition, there have been very few (if any) escooters visible on many of the Ginger systems, on their app – Milton Keynes (where they compete with Lime and TIER), Hartlepool, Scunthorpe, Whitehaven and even Middlesbrough (the first trial to launch). Only Chester and Great Yarmouth are still going strong. As is often the case with Ginger in particular, there is no news about this. Maybe they are just taking a Christmas/New Year break? The parking locations and zone boundaries still show in their app – but they do for Stafford too, where Ginger pulled out in late 2021. There are GBFS feeds available for some of the Ginger systems, through the Joyride white-label platform they use.
• Normally I stop consuming individual GBFS (and other API) feeds during a system’s winter closure period, however the variation with when systems reopen in the new year mean I often miss a few days (or weeks!) when they do restart, so this year I will keep consuming the empty feeds. I am gradually building a guide to indicative months that systems close and reopen, on BSWM, and will correlate this with the data seen in BSM (where available) and publish this additional static data, some time next year.
• Lincoln’s tiny Hire Bike website’s certificate has expired, apparently without the operator noticing, so I needed to skip verification of it when getting the website data. To be fair, it did expire on Christmas Day…
• Aberdeen’s Bike Issue Bikes ebikeshare finally opened in early November – perhaps with some of their bikes from their recently closed Bristol operation. I have updated the BSWM entry.
• Down the coast, the Dundee ebikeshare has gone into a longer winter hibernation this year – more of a temporary closure during a quite time of the year to improve the fleet and operations, rather than snow/ice led, although Scotland is certainly getting some weather at the moment.

Beryl has published a couple of snapshots of how they are doing in Hereford and Bournemouth.

They’ve just finished a free bike week in Hereford, where they made their service free to use. They’ve reported 9500km travelled during the week. Assuming an average journey of 1.5km, this equates to 6000 rides in 7 days, or 900 a day. Across the fleet of 125, that suggests over 7 uses per bike per day (t/b/d) – great! They also reported just over 10000 journeys in their first month (this included the free bike week). This suggests an average t/b/d of just under 3 – great numbers.

They’ve also published this graphic showing where in Bournemouth (& adjoining Poole on the left) their bikes are being used – almost everywhere it seems!

My current estimates are:

System	Docking Stations	Bikes
Santander Cycles (Central)	781	7754
Mobike	n/a	~1800
Lime-E [pedalecs]	n/a	~1500
JUMP [pedalecs]	n/a	>500
Freebike [pedalecs]	263*	353
Beryl	109*	169
Santander Cycles (Uxbridge)	6	33
Bird [eScooters]	n/a	>50

Totals: 9750 manual bikeshare bikes, 2350 pedalec bikeshare bikes, 50 escootersshare scooters.

The numbers above don’t include private systems not open to the public, such as KU Bikes (university students) or IHS Markit Freebike (employees).

* Some docking stations are shared across providers – specifically, Freebike and Beryl share docking stations on the City of London, but not in the other areas they currently operate.

The relaunch of Exeter’s Co-Bikes electric dock-based system has taken place today, following some previous operations the last few weeks. You can see the system live on Bike Share Map.

The new fee is:

	Casual
Membership Fee	£0
Start Fee	£0
Usage Fee	£1/20 minutes
Usage Credit	N/A
Out-of-Hub End Fee	£24+
Out-of-Hub Start Credit	N/A

Journeys from 8-24 hours are capped at £24. Maximum hire is 24 hours – bikes hired for longer are assumed lost and the user is charged a hefty penalty.

Edinburgh‘s Just Eat Cycles has reported a record month in August, the month during which the Edinburgh Fringe and Edinburgh International Festival takes place and the capital’s population significantly increases. The system launched in September last year, just too late for the previous Fringe/Festival month. This month, the system managed 17,529 rides, with around 400 bikes available through the month across 70 docking stations. This represents around 1.5 trips per bike per day (t/b/d). The system including the above graphic showing routes taken. Just Eat Cycles has since added some additional bikes in, in early September, and now has around 500 available.

Just Eat Cycles publishes its trip and availability data as open data. The Trip data is published within a day of the trips happening, an impressively quick turnaround. They also publish regular maps showing routes taken. The above map, for August, includes at least one trip to Edinburgh Airport and another trip to Cramond Island (accessible by a causeway only at low tide). The former doesn’t have a docking station so journeys incur an out-of-station fee, but the journey may still have been cheaper than tram/parking surcharges. The latter does at least have a docking station nearby, back on the mainland.

Monthly journeys, bikes and average trips/bike/day for Edinburgh, so far:

Month	Trips*	Avg Bikes	Trips/Bike/Day
September 2018**	2277	140	1.1
October 2018	3799	186	0.7
November 2018	4047	302	0.5
December 2018	3662	360	0.3
January 2019	4750	233	0.7
February 2019	4222	108	1.4
March 2019	6549	341	0.6
April 2019	8176	441	0.6
May 2019	14160	258	1.8
June 2019	10214	243	1.5
July 2019	12290	309	1.3
August 2019	17529	386	1.5

* Journeys on the last day of the month are normally missing from the trips data.
** Launched mid-month.

Hopefully Edinburgh will get to 2 t/b/d soon – a figure which is, very roughly, is a good benchmark for a well used, long-term-viable system. Edinburgh’s design means it can very easily move docking stations around, to adjust to corridors of good use (and low vandalism), although this has to be balanced against the frustration of loyal users finding their docking station has gone.

Bournemouth and Poole’s Beryl Bikes system is reporting 2500 journeys on their fleet during the four days of the Bournemouth Air Festival. In time, the system is planned to have around 1000 bikes, however currently it has around 250 bikes available so this suggests an average of 2.5 journeys/bike/day. These are encouraging numbers, similar to what is seen in London’s Santander Cycles system and possibly larger than any other system in the UK apart from nearby Brighton, showing that the south coast of England is a bit of a winner for bikeshare systems.

It does also suggest that Beryl might have “cracked” how to make a commercially viable, affordable and sustainable mid-size system. Beryl Bikes are dock-based, but the docks are simply painted on the ground.

BTN Bike Share, a hybrid system launched in the tourist and student city on 1 September 2017, has increased its fees for the first time. Previously, casual hires were £1 for up to 35 minutes and then 3p/minute. They are now: £1/hire + 3p/minute. Annual subscriptions are now £72/year with 30 minutes/day ride time (down from 1 hour).

From 1 August 2019 (changes from previous shown in brackets):

	Casual	Annual Membership
Membership Fee	£0	£72
Start Fee	£1	£0
Usage Fee	3p/minute	3p/minute
Usage Credit	N/A (was 35 minutes/jny)	30 minutes/day (was 60 minutes/day)
Out-of-Hub* End Fee	£2	£2
Out-of-Hub* Start Credit	£1	£1

* Bikes parked near hubs (e.g. if the hub is full) are not considered to be out-of-hub.

The changes in charges seem designed to encourage shorter journeys, which, as this is a popular, well used system, is likely to make it more efficient. BTN Bike Share may in fact be the UK’s most well used bikeshare system.

Trip Numbers

Some data on usage between the launch and July 2019 (i.e. 22 months):

• 1.25 million miles travelled (2 million km). With an average of 320 bikes over 570 days that means each bike does an average of 11km a day – impressive!
• 650,000 journeys. This suggests an average journey of 3km and a typical 3-4 trips per bike per day (t/b/d). 3km is higher than the ~1-2km average distance travelled on a bikeshare bike across other cities, but then research does suggest electric bikeshares typically do result in longer journeys.
• 80000 subscribers. This sounds like a hugely impressive number considering the population of Brighton – so I wonder if this is actually the number of distinct users, including visitors taking one-off trips. I can’t believe that 80000 people are paying the annual membership fee.
• As of July 2019, the system reports they have 570 bikes and 68 hubs. On Bike Share Map we’ve seen a maximum of 459 bikes available for hire, seen at the end of May 2019 – a discrepancy of 24%. However, the number of hubs is correct.

Our own t/b/d research, looking at docking station data, suggests:

	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
2017	–	–	No data	2.3
2018	1.5	4.7	5.4	3.0
2019	2.8	3.9

We detected approximately 690,000 journeys which is broadly consistent with the published number. We notice that Brighton sees around 10% more journeys on weekdays than weekends.

(Data courtesy of James Todd.)

The system is publically funded, with the council investing £290,000, and the national government investing £1.6 million. The council receives back 50% of profits above £330k made by the operator.

BTN Bike Share is operated by Hourbike on behalf of Brighton & Hove City Council. It uses Social Bicycles pedelec bikes, an older version of those used by JUMP systems. Social Bicycles subsequently created the JUMP brand for their electric bikes and were then bought by Uber.

It remains to be seen if the fees increase will dent the popularity of the system, and whether it will cause a shift towards being more tourist used – a less price sensitive segment. Any weekend/weekday t/b/d change should be detectable in due course.

The Google Maps Android app now shows the locations of available Lime bikes, which, in the UK, operate in much of London, Milton Keynes and Oxford. It is, for now, quite well hidden.

The app shows the bikes as a potential option when planning a journey, although not as a dedicated entry in the mode choice “band”. Instead, they currently appears as:

1. A sub-option when you choose cycling (which you would probably only do if you had your own bike). “Your bike” is the default, but Lime appears as a toggle at the bottom of the app.:

On selecting it, it will show the route to the nearest bike, and also other nearby Lime bikes:

2. An “also consider” option when looking a public transport options – interestingly this one picks a slightly further away Lime bike, but one which results in a much shorter overall journey (7 minutes here) than the “dedicated cyclist” option above:

3. A suggested alternative “route” when looking at the walking route map, which also picks the shortest walk/cycle combination route:

The data displayed includes the number of bikes “nearby”, the walking time to the nearest one, a confirmation that it is an “electric bike” (i.e. pedelec), its battery range, a guideline journey length and time, and an estimated cost.

Google does know Lime’s operating area – if you choose a origin or destination that is outside of it, then the option doesn’t appear. However, it doesn’t show this boundary in the app itself. Lime’s boundary is fairly nebulous – it has two official operating areas in north and south London but in practice currently allows journeys to start/end in the central area between the official areas, without penalties being applied.

One thing to note is, the bikes don’t appear in the app if you are not planning a journey. So it is, for now, rather hidden away. However, the general public will probably not think of using a single-mode app for their journey planning, no matter how each of the operators would love them to. So, having this information on Google Maps is a really big deal for the 99% of people who would see bikeshare as an alternative rather than the first choice mode in their mind. Especially as the other 5 systems currently operating in central London (Santander Cycles, Mobike, Jump, Freebike and Beryl) are not currently offered as an option. Google Maps does show Santander Cycle docking stations (if you zoom right in) with the current number of bikes there, but doesn’t appear to suggest journeys with these.

CityMapper continue to also map Lime bikes, along with Mobike and Santander Cycles – so 3 of the 6 central London systems:

In both Google Maps and CityMapper, the app will switch away to the dedicated Lime app (if you have it installed) when you start a transaction (i.e. hiring the bike).

Lime announced the tie-in on their website. It looks like it is a direct partnership by the two. Lime data is available for some areas in the US (e.g. New York City) via an GBFS-format open data feed, but this does not include London.

TfL’s own journey planner suggests Santander Cycles, but none of the other five, on the journey planner section of its website. Uber’s app is having a go at trying to be a multi-modal planner by including TfL rail/bus options, but of course only its own “Jump” bikes for its bikeshare options. It currently feels like the rail/bus information is only there to highlight how much better/quicker its own options may be.

So, multi-modal journey planning continues to make small improvements, but we are still a long way from any one app showing all the options. Meanwhile, on the City of London/Islington border, six separate systems, all with different operating areas, fees and rules, fight it out, while for large parts of London, only driving, expensive cabs or slow buses remain the only option.