Maturity of Bike Share Systems
Bike Sharing Takes Off by Statista I recently saw the above info graphic with an article in US News: The Exploding Growth of Bike Sharing But if you look at the number of systems, the rate of growth is actually slowing Cumulative Number Added
2002
7
7
2003
11
4
2004
13
2
2005
17
4
2006
25
8
2007
62
37
2008
128
66
2009
209
81
2010
328
119
2011
431
103
2012
497
66
This is a good thing in many respects. At some point we need to stop adding systems and start making them bigger, inter-connecting and inter-operating, and even merging them. Ideally I should have one subscription that can be used on any system in the world (I have said similar for transit passes, see Club Transit), and bikes could be borrowed and deposited anywhere. Very few people will of course take a bikeshare bike from Minneapolis to Chicago, but Minneapolitans should automatically be able to use the Chicago system (and vice versa). And like the electric inter-urban users of yore (one could take an electric inter-urban (trolley) from Elkhart Lake Wisconsin to Oneonta, New York, it was said), one should be able to bike share between major places, even if transferring bikes periodically. So while the chart does not represent what it purports to represent, the number of bike share users (and bike share bicycles) may still be growing at an increasing rate, i.e. we may still be on the left side of the S-Curve for the technology, even if the number of systems, like the number of cities (and railroads and airports) is not growing as much or at all.