The Bike -sharing World -The Last week of April 2016

North America
USA:

Over 71,000,000 trips on public bikes in the U.S.A. since 2008

In the last few months there have been a few good and interesting reports about the state of Public Use Bicycling in the United States. These reports have been widely circulated by various media. We at The Bike-sharing Blog welcome all research and reports that further the public use bicycle industry. We assiduously read them all. The most positive report was Bikesharing and Bicycle Safety written by Elliot Martin, Adam Cohen, Jan Botha, and Susan Shaheen for the Minetta Transportation Institute. Their research showed that there had been no fatalities involving public use bicycles as of January 2016 and that public bikes are statically safer than trips on private bikes.

Since I do a lot of research for this blog, I was curious to know just how many public use bicycle trips there have been in USA. The first public program of substantial size was the SmartBike D.C. system in Washington, D.C. which started with 120 bikes and 10 stations in August 2008. Using that as the starting point. I polled individual programs, accessed open data and queried vendors with the question, "Since the launch of your program or system, how many trips have been taken through December 31, 2015." With a 98% response rate, the total is 71,382,780. That is a lot of bicycle trips with no fatalities and an extremely good safety record.

Over 32,000 bikes in the public use bicycle fleet are put in over 3,400 stations throughout 105 Municipalities in the U.S.A.

In early April, the United States Department of Transportation issued a report on the connectivity of Bike-share Stations in the United States. Unfortunately, when first issued, 40 municipalities and 1,000 stations were missing from the totals. By the diligence of this blog and city program operators, it has now been corrected. It is great that the U.S. Department of Transportation understands the importance of public use bicycle programs and how they fit in the greater transportation needs of the United States.

The count of bicycles, stations, and cities comes from The Bike-sharing World Map. These numbers are for programs that are only open to the general public and that are automated and station-based. In the case of a university-owned program, it is only counted if there are stations off-campus and completely available to the general public. Bike libraries and manned programs and corporate and university campuses that are not open to the general public are not surveyed for this count. 

image: ZYP Bikeshare,  Hudson Bikeshare

Russell Meddin          bikesharephiladelphia.org

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