Bike Share & Sustainable Mobility

Overview

Bike share is globally considered a sustainable transportation solution, with strong potential to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by replacing car trips with bicycle trips. This story sets that proposition against the wider emissions picture: according to the EPA, carbon dioxide from fossil fuel use accounted for more than 50 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions worldwide in 2007, and transportation is the second-largest source of CO2 emissions in the United States after electricity generation. Cycling — and station-based bike share in particular — is presented as a credible alternative.

Methodology

The story is a single-page information-design poster that brings several open data sources into one frame. Global CO2 emissions trends from the EIA are charted from 1980 to 2010. Per-capita emissions for Kyoto Protocol signatories are compared across two snapshots, 1997 and 2010, using a slope-style chart. A worldwide map plots bike share program scale by number of bikes (2010), with an enlarged European inset, and a U.S. map shows existing and planned programs as of 2012. A horizontal timeline traces the history of bike share schemes from the 1960s through 2010, picking out individual programs (White Bike Plan in Amsterdam, La Rochelle’s free bike system, Vélib’, BIXI, and others). Sources are EPA, EIA, SFMTA, People for Bikes (Bike Belongs), Shaheen, Guzman & Zhang’s Bikesharing in Europe, the Americas, and Asia, and the European Cyclists’ Federation’s Cycle More Often 2 Cool Down the Planet!. The poster was composed in Adobe Illustrator.

Findings

Bike share has grown rapidly: as of 2010 there were more than 300 bike share systems worldwide, with the largest fleets concentrated in France, Spain, Italy and China. In the United States, the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center reported 41 cities and schools with bike share programs by 2012, and New York’s planned 10,000-bike system was set to be the country’s largest. The system has evolved through three generations — from the original free-bike schemes that lost most of their inventory to theft, to coin-deposit systems, to today’s IT-enabled, station-based programs that use smartcards, online reservation and GPS tracking. Per-capita CO2 emissions data shows that several high-emitting Kyoto signatories made little progress between 1997 and 2010, sharpening the case for transport-sector interventions like bike share.

Takeaways

Even with operational drawbacks, bike share is a working example of a sustainable transport mode that can reduce urban congestion, support last-mile trips from other transit, and deliver individual benefits — better health, savings, more social interaction. European cities have shown the model works at scale; demand for bike share is likely to keep rising. Bringing together emissions data, program inventories and the history of the systems themselves makes the policy case more concrete than any single dataset would on its own.