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.)