The report "Shared Ambition 2024" by Cycling Industries Europe (CIE) and supported by the MegaBITS project offers an in-depth benchmarking study on bike sharing across 148 strategic European cities. The aim is to assess the performance of bike-sharing schemes in the context of urban mobility, climate policies, and EU initiatives.
MegaBITS is proud to support this useful tool for cities and policy makers for the second year. Bike sharing is a service that requires connected bicycles, therefore it has the intrinsic quality of using and creating datasets that can be analysed to improve the cycling experience. Safer, more convenient and more comfortable cycling through the use of ITS technologies are the goals of the MegaBITS project, and data generated by bike share schemes is a crucial source for achieving this.
Key Highlights of the 2024 report:
To download the report, click here.
To download the supplement, click here.
Scope: the report evaluates bike-sharing operations in 148 cities, including 100 from the EU's Climate-Neutral Cities Mission and 48 urban nodes from the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T).
Growth & Data Expansion: Compared to the first edition (2023), the 2024 report includes more comprehensive data from 98 cities, reflecting a full year of data collection. This provides deeper insights, especially with new city entries like Ljubljana and Tartu.
Top Performers: Cities like Paris, Antwerp, Ljubljana, and Tartu ranked highest in daily trips per 1000 inhabitants. Paris led with nearly 37 trips per 1000 inhabitants per day.
Fleet Size and Utilization: Fleet size strongly correlates with the number of trips generated. Cities with more than 50 bikes per 10,000 inhabitants generally had better performance. The report also emphasizes that a minimum fleet size is crucial for a city's bike-share system to have a significant impact.
Economic & Environmental Impact: The report estimates that increasing bike sharing in underperforming cities to the level of top performers could result in 650 million trips annually, saving around 270,000 tons of CO2 per year.
Electric Bikes: Electrically assisted bikes (e-bikes) represent 21.3% of shared fleets but account for 30.6% of trips, demonstrating their higher utilization compared to mechanical bikes.
Investment Needs: The report estimates that an additional 270,000 shared bikes would require an investment of €325 million to increase bike-sharing impact across Europe.
Policy Recommendations:
Cities are encouraged to integrate larger fleets and e-bikes to improve performance and ensure equitable access. Public funding and private partnerships are necessary for long-term sustainability.
Transparent data-sharing practices are recommended to enhance benchmarking and help cities track their progress.
The report aims to set new benchmarks in sustainable urban mobility, pushing cities to adopt ambitious bike-sharing goals aligned with broader EU climate objectives.
To watch the launch webinar, click here.