The Global Bike Sharing Services data forms the world's only comprehensive atlas of bikeshare services. The atlas covers virtually every active and former service across the world. It was created in 2009 and is now edited by a global team of volunteer contributors to compile bikesharing data from approximately 2007 onwards.
Content
Data are available at the city-system level and include operator name, urban area, location (approximate latitude/longitude of its centroid), type of bike, estimated size (number of bikes, pedelecs, cargo bikes and docking stations), operator and equipment. The data contains individual records for each of the approximately 3000 bikesharing systems in the world. In some cases (where automated summary feeds are available, or cell sampling or regular media updates), each record has monthly historic numbers on total size, allowing trends to be seen (some trends are inferred where data is temporally sparse.) These data are supplied via the separate Bike Share Map project run at UCL.
For detailed description of the columns contained within the data, see the Variable Dictionary; and for an overview of the characteristics of the data, see the Data Summary. These files can be downloaded from the bottom of this page.
Quality, Representation and Bias
The quality varies as most data relies on manual observations and updates made by the volunteer editorial team.
The ease of obtaining and validating the data varies by country. Some key countries, such as China, will have quite substantial missing records due to the fast-changing nature of the industry in the country and the challenges in obtaining the data. As such there will be a slight bias in terms of how up-to-date and accurate the data are, towards Western countries, particularly the USA and some European countries which have a good tradition of open data access. Some cities will not have been updated for several years; however, most currently open systems have been reviewed in the last twelve months.
