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London has a popular bicycle-sharing scheme called Santander Cycles, formerly known as Barclays Cycle Hire. It is a public bicycle hire scheme that allows residents and visitors to rent bicycles for short journeys around the city. Barclays Cycle Hire was launched in 2010. It was often referred to as “Boris Bikes” after then-Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who supported and promoted the scheme.
Santander Cycles provides a network of docking stations where users can rent and return bicycles. Users can purchase access for a day, a week, or a year. After accessing a bicycle from a docking station, users can ride it to their destination and return it to any nearby docking station.
The Santander Cycles fleet in September 2021 consisted of over 12,000 bicycles available at around 750 docking stations. This makes it one of the largest public bike-sharing systems in the world.
The scheme contributes to reducing carbon emissions and traffic congestion in the city. It’s estimated that the use of Santander Cycles has saved over 32,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions since its launch.
Below is the map created by Oliver O’Brien that shows 12.4 million bicycle trips taken on the Barclays Cycle Hire system in London for over 7 months, from 13 December 2013 to 19 July 2014. Thickness of each section on the map conforms to the calculated number of bikeshare bikes moving along that section. The busiest segment of all this time is on Tavistock Place, a very popular cycle route just south of the Euston Road in Bloomsbury.
Hre is interactive map of the docking stations created by Oliver O’Brien.
Below is another interactive map created by Ilya Boyandin using Greater London Authority‘s data, that shows the numbers of trips between the stations of London’s Santander Cycle Hire Scheme in 2017. This dataset represents around 1.5 million trips. These are about 34% of all trips made in 2017, retaining the top ten thousand origin-destination pairs with the highest numbers of trips.
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Love this fascinating map of London bike hire activity! So many trips across Hyde Park…to connect between tube lines? Lot’s of folks (commuters?) with journeys to/from KX/St.Pancras/Waterloo stations, beats the tube! And a surge of activity in the northeast at Stratford…why?
Love this fascinating map of London bike hire activity! So many trips across Hyde Park…to connect between tube lines? Lot’s of folks (commuters?) with journeys to/from KX/St.Pancras/Waterloo stations, beats the tube! And a surge of activity in the northeast at Stratford…why?