What Makes Bike-Sharing Work? Insights from 43 Million Kilometers of European Cycling Data
Bike- and e-bike-sharing promise sustainable, equitable mobility - but what makes these systems successful? Despite hundreds of cities operating thousands of shared bikes, trip data is rarely public. To address this, we built a geospatial analysis pipeline that reconstructs trip data from publicly accessible system status feeds. Using this method, we gathered 43 million km of bike-sharing trips across 268 European cities. Combined with over 100 urban indicators per city, our analyses reveal how infrastructure, climate, demographics, operations, and politics shape system performance. We uncover surprising insights - such as why some e-bike systems underperform despite strong demand - and highlight how cities can design smarter, fairer mobility. All data and code are open-source, with an interactive demo at dataviz.nefton.de.