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.

Following on from yesterday’s post about the forthcoming New York City bikeshare, I’ve created a mockup of how the scheme might look like on my Bike Share Map. The mockup uses the most popular locations voted for by people on the NYC DoT website. It scales each docking station size by the number of votes received, and pseudorandomly decides how empty or full each docking station is, based on the initial time of the suggestion and whether or not the suggesting person said they worked near there. It’s set so that stations near where the person said they worked are more likely to be full – hence the cluster of full stations in Lower Manhattan and Midtown, while much of Brooklyn’s stations are quite empty.

There is a clickable, zoomable version here – I’ve tried to keep to the published boundaries of the scheme. It shows 585 docking stations (announced target 600), and 9802 bikes (target 10000), with a total of 20988 docking points across the stations. Every suggested docking station that had at least five votes as of a couple of hours ago, has been included.

This is a scheme that will have twice as many bikes as London, in an area only around 50% bigger – and there’s more water in the area. So the density of stations does look higher. The average size of each station (35 docking points, assuming roughly 2.2 docking points for each bike) is also around 50% bigger than London’s (23 on average).

It’s been announced today that the Alta Bicycle Company will be operating the huge New York City bike-share that will be likely launching next summer. An informative press release reveals the area of the scheme, which will be slightly larger than London’s existing area, but with roughly twice as many bikes in the system and 50% more docking stations, it will have a slightly higher density of available bikes and stations than here in London. The bike and dock design is likely to be very similar to London’s so will be very familiar to anyone visiting from across the pond – it’s also the same system used in Montreal, Washington DC/Arlington, Minneapolis, Boston, Toronto, Ottawa and Melbourne.

Interestingly the system will be financed entirely privately. I’m sure this will be an immense challenge, as London’s capital and operating costs are high. However London has demonstrated that advertising can be a very good deal for the advertiser concerned if the scheme is a success. (London’s planning overhead and so capital expense is also almost certainly higher than New York’s.) The scheme will run 24/365. NYC gets some pretty intense snowstorms in the winter, but so does Washington DC’s scheme, which also runs throughout the year – with occasional suspensions when it gets really bad.

NY will doubtless be looking to London closely, as it probably is the scheme most similar to New York’s – the same technology, roughly the same size and area (all of the US and Canada’s schemes are much smaller) and London’s topography is also quite similar – a major river bisecting the scheme, a single major business district (although London will cover two with next year’s extension to Canary Wharf) with a separate commercial centre, and a very large public park. Doubtless NY will see huge popularity for the bikes in Central Park on weekends, as London does in Hyde Park, and a big morning “commuter surge” from Brooklyn into Lower Manhattan, just like London’s from the Waterloo area to the City.

Interestingly the proposed area extends deep into Brooklyn, but on Manhattan Island it extends only up to 79th Street – roughly a third of the way up Central Park. I would be surprised if, on scheme launch, there aren’t some docking stations in Central Park that don’t in fact go north of this line. New York’s density and road layout structure means there are ample opportunities for the scheme to grow in the future, too.

Two websites have also gone live – Alta’s NYC Bikeshare has some nice mock-up pictures of the bikes (from which I’ve stolen the above pic) + an NYC Dept of Transportation website allows you to pick where you would like to suggest a docking station.

Very pleased to see a link to my bike map from the Alta site. With both big operators in North America (B-Cycle and Alta) being tacitly supportive of third-party maps such as my own – a big constrast to continental Europe – and the station data format likely to be the same, I have high hopes that we will see the plethora of mobile apps, maps and visualisations from the community expand to cover NYC.

N.B. The map above is my own estimate based on the press release boundary mentions. The final scheme on launch will not necessarily match these boundaries.

I was in the Loire region of France last week for a holiday. Unusually for me, a “proper” holiday – no international orienteering racing or mountaineering. Instead, a chance to be a real tourist, visit les châteaux and try a bit of the local grape-based drinks.

…but France is rather advanced when it comes to bike sharing systems and I came across three of them:

Tours – Velociti

A traditional free-floating scheme rather than a dock-based one – members take one of the bright yellow bikes (below) and then lock it up whereever, when they are finished. I didn’t see anyone using them, but did spot them locked up in a few places, including one outside the train station and a few in a quiet square in the town.

Angers – Velocite+

Angers has apparently had a free-floating one for a long while, called Velocite – I didn’t spot any of these. But I did spot this seemingly brand new extension – Velocite+. There is only one (very large) docking station, right outside the train station. The docking station had Every dock was taken with a bike – presumably if there is only one docking station in a scheme, this is not a problem. The fee (effectively three euros for up to five hours) means people could feasibly hire one out at lunchtime and use it several times in an afternoon, before returning it back to the single docking station, rather than make short station-to-station hops. No sign of it being used yet.

Angers has also just launched its rather innovative tram – in the historic central section it uses radio-activated sections of electric third-rail, rather than unsightly overhead wires and gantries.

Paris – Velib

On the way back home, I had a day in Paris, and what better way around than by Velib? After spending much of the day around the canal area in the north-east and Sacre-Coeur, I headed into the centre (during the evening rush hour), then around to the Louvre, Notre Dame, and back up to Gare du Nord.

I managed eight journeys in all, and even got the bonus 15-minute credit for having dropped off a bike on the hill near Sacre-Coeur.

You can see the pics from my trip in this Flickr gallery or here: