Bike Share Geographies

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Oliver O’Brien created this graphic representation of “Bike Share Georgraphies Around the World.”

It shows the “footprint” of the docking stations making up 49 bike share systems around the world. The colours represent the empty/full state of each docking station at the particular moment in time when the image was made. The numbers show the total number of docking points – each docking station being made up of one or more docking points, each of which may or may not have a bike currently parked in it.

The geographies and topographies of the cities themselves inform the shape of the systems – particularly coastal cities (e.g. Nice, Rio, Barcelona, Miami Beach) and ones with large mountains near their centres (e.g. Montreal).

If you take a look at Paris you can see the empty space marking the Seine River in the middle of a sea of dots.