September 27, 2023 - (Brussels, BEL) A first of its kind study by Cycling Industries Europe (CIE) ranks bike sharing services in 148 European cities and reveals major gaps in performance between front-runners and late-adopters. 250 000 tons of CO2 could be saved every year in Europe if cities followed the example set by Paris and other leading European cities.
CIE’s “Shared Ambition” study gives cities key insights into how to improve their bike sharing offer, generate more trips and make cities greener and more liveable. The study reveals that future 2024 Olympic Games host Paris, followed by Bordeaux, Antwerp, Toulouse, and Lyon, leads the way when it comes to daily trips per inhabitant.
If all the cities covered in the study were to reach the benchmark of at least 19 trips per 1000 inhabitants per day set by front-runners, bike sharing would help save 250,000 tons of CO2 every year in Europe. An estimated €240 million investment to add 200,000 shared bikes in European cities would be necessary to achieve this.
Additional key indicators emerge from the comparisons made in the study, such as the minimum number of trips per day per bike required to make a bike sharing scheme viable, and the minimum number of bikes per inhabitant required to ensure sufficient coverage and relevance.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, 20 European cities, including 10 cities with over 100,000 population, have no schemes in place at all, leaving 3.3 million European city-dwellers without access to a bike sharing service.
With 70% of Europeans living in cities and transport accounting for over a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, bike sharing services offer an inclusive, affordable and healthy solution towards slashing transport-related emissions by 90% by 2050, a key objective of the EU’s Green Deal.
Kevin Mayne, CEO of CIE said: The “Shared Ambition” report is incredibly powerful, because it shows exactly how every city in Europe can set ambitious targets and measure results for improvements in sustainable mobility through bike sharing. I am also proud of CIE’s members who are showing the EU and other policy makers that the private sector is committed to innovative and open data services that can revolutionise our understanding of mobility. I hope we will be joined by every city in Europe for future versions of this report, let’s work together to hit new heights.
Convening leading European bike share operators and service providers, CIE’s Expert Group on Bike Sharing is committed to helping cities enact the best possible bike sharing schemes and identify EU-level investment support to accelerate their deployment. The group took the initiative to develop the study and could count on Europe’s leading aggregator of shared mobility data, Fluctuo, to provide the data. In parallel, the expert group is developing key performance indicators for the bike sharing business models, sustainability and circularity.
The launch of “Shared Ambition” is also supported by the MegaBITs project (Mobilizing Europe’s Green Ambition through Bicycles and Intelligent Transport Systems) which aims to raise the standard of data capture, sharing and analysis in the EU. This benchmarking approach is an important demonstration of this potential and will be used as a case study by the project to develop other data tools and reports.
For the full report here.
