Paris Ranks Number One of 148 European Bike Share Systems

Paris, France

Cycle Industries Europe recently released a comprehensive summary of European bike share systems.

In summary, it reported that there are now systems in 148 cities across Europe with only 10 cities of 100,000 or greater population that do not yet have bike sharing at all.

Not only did Paris rank number one, but four of the five top cities were French, when ranked by the number of trips per day per 1,000 inhabitants. The top five in order were: Paris, Bordeaux, Antwerp (Belgium), Toulouse and Lyon.

Higher Density Equals More Hires Per Bike Per Day

When it comes to how often each bike in the fleet is hired each day, the top city, Bilbao (Spain) had over seven trips per bike per day whereas the bottom cities had less than one.

One of the key indicators of usage was the density of the fleet. That is, how many share bikes are available per 10,000 population in each city.

Only those with the highest density, over 35.4 bikes per 10,000 population, made it into the top 10 ranking of rides per bike per day.

Some of the top 10 ranked cities had up to 100% e-bikes in the fleet and others had no e-bikes. All of the top 10 cities had at least half of the fleet in docking stations, the range being from 57% up to 100%. The remaining bikes are ‘free floating’ ie do not have to be parked in docking stations.

The longest average trip length across a fleet was 2.2km with most cities falling into the 1km to 2km range.