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.