New York City last week released a preliminary map showing the proposed sites for the launch of its bike sharing scheme, now named Citi Bike (with Citigroup being the lead sponsor along with Mastercard).

Citigroup’s sponsorship is crucial for the scheme, which has promised no public subsidy on at least operating costs, and is a rather convenient sponsor in terms of its name. In several other cities around the world, their bike share schemes are known as City Bikes, such as Stockholm and Vienna, so Citi Bike has a good chance of becoming the “on the street” name for the scheme, unlike the unwieldy “Barclays Cycle Hire” name we have here in London – most people here know them as the snappier, if politically incorrect “Boris Bikes”.

NYC’s scheme is clearly influenced by London’s – its of a similar size, it has a big sponsor from financial services and a mayor fully behind it, and a Boris Bike from London even appears on the front cover of the NYC DOT presentation to communities. The technology used is the same and the bikes are also the same design.

I’ve extracted the data from the official map and added it to my own set of maps for 50+ bike share cities across the world allowing for a direct comparison between the scheme and the existing ones. The initial map has 413 stands – the districts either side of Central Park are missing, as is central Brooklyn, as these areas are still undergoing consultation and will gain coverage next year. The scheme should be opening this summer and is then due to expand by 50% by Autumn 2013.

The stand sizes and descriptions are also from the official map, and I’ve simulated the empty/full status of each stand, based on the distance from Wall Street and random perturbation. This results in just under 7000 bikes, based on a roughly 1:1 empty to occupied stand ratio, which is fairly standard around the world.

New York vs London

* Announced figure. Actual figure may be less due to bikes in maintenance and temporary storage. London’s equivalent figure was 6000 bikes. ** Zone 1 only. Cost higher if travelling to Zone 2 (which has bike share bikes in it). Cost lower if only in Zone 2.

What stands out for me, when comparing New York‘s and London‘s bike share schemes, which are roughly similar in terms of number of bikes and stands, is that NY’s footprint is similar in size to London’s at launch , but with many more bikes, and the scheme is accordingly more dense. Certainly, New York will have the critical mass of stand locations, so allow the scheme to work efficiently – you’ll never have to travel very far, if your destination stand is full, to find another one.

The other thing that strikes me is that all the stands are quite big – very few of them have less than 20 docks. The biggest, on Pershing Square (by Grand Central Station) has 128 docks – this is ever so slightly larger than our own “superdock” at Waterloo Station and presumably designed with a similar purpose of satisfying the commuter “tide”. The other big commuter station in NYC, Penn Station, has three large docks surrounding it. The coverage is also fairly uniform, my only surprise is that there are only two docks in Battery City, which is surely full of people likely to use the scheme – or perhaps they just walk to work? Also there are none in Central Park – although perhaps these will be included in the Upper East/Upper West areas for next year’s expansion?

One big difference is the fee structure – at $10 a day but only $95 a year, this suggests that tourists and public-transport-based commuters are the target users, rather than local residents and errand users. This is a pity – the latter group tends have more heterogenous usage flows and help “mix” the scheme up and redistribute it organically, requiring less redistribution of bikes trucks by the operator.

$10 is four times more than the cost of the New York subway ($2.50/trip with Metrocard) so you would need to do at least four journeys a day to save money. In London, our tube in Zone 1 is £2 per journey with Oystercard) or £1 a day on the Boris Bikes. So end up often using the latter simply on cost, even for one journey. The over-30-minute journey extra cost is also significantly more – $4 compared with £1 here. Subscribers get 45 minutes free rather than 30 minutes. This gives those commuters a chance to travel further in the busy rush hour – although surely this increase the redistribution challenge even further.

NYC’s CitiBikes are thinking big, and the design of the scheme suggests that it is expected to be wildly successful at launch. Hopefully this will prove to be the case!

You can see my map here.

Photo credit: Edward Reed / NYC Mayor’s Office

As planned, Tower Hamlets (east London) and Shepherd’s Bush (west London) saw a big expansion of bike share docking stations, overnight last Wednesday night. There’s also been some incremental additions to the existing zone, and a build-out of Camden Town in the days leading to the “big bang” expansion.

So where are the new docks? As Diamond Geezer has noted, the all four compass points have received new bike share docking stations recently.

The map below shows (in colour) the new docking stations – those that were installed since 1 January 2012, and are currently operational. The old ones are in grey.

The numbers:

There are a few more “ghost” docking stations that appear on the map, these are old docking stations that have been decommissioned or more new ones that were recently in testing and so appeared on the official map – TfL have promised an additional 10-15 docking stations) will go in in early April.

Background map CC-By-SA OpenStreetMap contributors.

Christmas Day this year recorded far and away the highest ever simultaneous usage of the Barclays Cycle Hire bikes, aka the Boris Bikes, probably meaning it was the biggest number of hires in a single day too. The lack of any Christmas Day tube or bus service in the capital is the obvious reason for the huge usage spike. Previous popular days for the were the four tube strikes in late 2010. Both these events can be seen in the graph above. There is a diamond for each day, showing the difference between the maximum number of bikes available at a point in the day (typically at around 3am), and the minimum available (typically around 4pm for weekends or 9am/6pm for weekdays). Christmas Day was the big jump on the far right of the graph. The jump is much bigger than for Christmas Day 2010, as that day was pretty cold and snowy and only especially hardened tourists would be using the bikes then.

The top days are (measured by maximum closed-system simultaneous usage, i.e. maximum number of Boris Bikes out of the docks and rolling around the streets in a single moment, assuming no removal or addition by the operator that day):

• Sunday 25 December 2011 – 2065 (Christmas Day – no tubes or buses)
• Sunday 2 October 2011 – 1795 (Late summer heatwave)
• Thursday 3 February 2011 – 1791 (?)
• Tuesday 15 March 2011 – 1649 (Likely false result – mass removal)
• Saturday 1 October 2011 – 1627 (Late summer heatwave)

Actual total usage on each day is likely to be roughly proportional, and typically ~20 times the above numbers.

Note – please don’t read too much into the lowest usage days that appear on the graph. We’ve had quite a few power problems with our server room this year, and such low days may simply be when we were able to record little if any data. Large-scale bike removals and additions by the operator can also distort the results quite a bit, by perhaps up to 500 bikes a day. Mass additions to the system will depress the true result for that day, while mass removals can falsely inflate the numbers. It’s difficult to spot these, except by looking at the graph for the previous and following days, and comparing the max/min numbers.

Now available on the Bike Share Map are five extra French cities: Montpellier, St Etienne, Calais, Valence and Vannes, as well as Kunshan in China. I’m also now showing the relaunched bike share in Rio de Janeiro – yes, you can #bikeshare beside Copacabana Beach. This brings the total currently being visualised to 45 – not including several that have shut down for the winter and will be back, and some others where I’ve been asked not to collect the data. Thanks to Russell from the Bike-sharing Blog for the tip-offs for all of these.

So far, Montpellier, Rio and Kunshan are looking potentially very interesting, while there’s nothing much going on in Calais, St Etienne, Valence or Vannes.

I’ve also added some extra stats on each bike share, showing the number of docks and how many are completely empty and completely full – often surprisingly many after rush-hour for certain cities.

Finally and perhaps most importantly I’m now showing current weather conditions for most of the cities. The data is the METAR information for the major airport nearest each city, supplied and decoded by the NOAA Internet Weather Source. I’m picking up the reports every hour or so (some report less frequently) and caching them. Hopefully they will prove accurate. Currently it’s reporting 0°C in Toronto and 27°C in Rio de Janeiro.

About 6,600 according to the Mayor and cited in this Evening Standard article. But these include the bikes in storage, such bikes are not much help to people wanting to use them on the streets of the capital.

A more accurate figure, that is the number of bikes on the streets of London, that you can actually use, would be about 4900. The number (shown in the graph with the blue dots, indicating maximum values) does fluctuate a lot though:

One interesting feature on the graphs is the four red dots on their own, on the left hand side (i.e. August-December 2010) which are noticeably lower than the others. The red dots show the minimum number of bikes available (i.e. the maximum number of bikes being used) on that day. These four dots in particular, represent a four very busy day for the bike share scheme – they correspond to the four tube strike days.

Occasionally the data feed fails, for a day or so, so the maximum and minimum numbers combine. It is normally reasonable to assume that the maximum value for a particular day shows the number of bikes available on the streets, as probably fewer than 10 bikes will be being ridden at some moment during the day – the usage minimum is typically at around 4am.

I’ve added Lille and Bath to the Bike Share Map. Lille’s system, V’Lille, was soft-launched a few weeks ago, while Bike in Bath, a very small system run by Bicincitta, also launched recently. Bath’s uptake so far seems to have been virtually non-existent – with no rides yet today – however Lille’s usage has been nothing short of spectacular – yesterday, nearly 70% of all the bikes in the system were on the streets rather than in the docks. In fact, Lille tops the following table which shows my estimated maximum use of bike share bikes across 17 cities yesterday. In calculating these numbers, I’ve assumed that at some point in the night before/after, no bikes were being used, and that any change in the total number of docks is because of faulty bikes. That last assumption is a conservative one, so the actual %s may well be a little higher. I can’t be sure that these are accurate numbers so these stats should not be regarded as being definitive, just (perhaps) indicative.

Lille leads the way and Seoul’s small system (in two seperate suburbs) also had impressive usage. San Antonio in Texas, another small system, is in a surprise third place, with London fourth. Vienna also had a very good day.

Sunday 2 October – Estimated Maximum Simultaneous Use

Thanks as ever to Russell from the Bike-sharing Blog for alerting me to Lille and Bath’s go-live.

Picture from Jason Jones on Flickr.