Bikesharing has its roots in big cities like Paris, London, and Montreal, but the real sign of success is when it takes hold in smaller towns.
Aspen, Colorado is the first mountain town to offer bikesharing, with We-Cycle. Last summer, it opened with 13 stations. Coloradans have already seen bikesharing in Denver and Boulder.
To show how people used the system, we made a short animation using data from two weeks of ridership, June 23 to July 6, 2013, with each day overlaid onto the same 24-hour cycle. A histogram shows the overall ridership patterns over the course of a day.
This summer will see the launch of another small-town system, ArborBike at the University of Michigan. Houston’s B-Cycle is a small system in a big city, growing from three stations since its debut in 2012 to 21 stations today.
Is there an economy of scale for bikesharing systems? How does the overall size of the network affect efficiency and cost recovery? If you’ve used one of the smaller bikeshare systems, we’d love to hear your experiences about using it to get around small towns.