Yesterday, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) released its much-anticipated Bike-Share Planning Guide, a comprehensive report on bike share’s history and current practice. Amid the droves of information on history, bike share’s benefits, business models, planning, implementation, and best practices, the document answers two important questions. First, what makes a bike share program “world-class”? Second, what programs are “world class”?

To answer those questions, the document identifies several performance metrics–two of which are of particular note: (1) average number of daily uses per bike; and (2) average number of daily trips per resident. By examining figures from dozens of programs worldwide, ITDP identifies the following seven cities (seen in the green portion of the graph to the right) as having world-class bike share programs:

• Barcelona, which averages 10.8 trips per bike and 67.9 trips per 1,000 residents;
• Lyon, which averages 8.3 trips per bike and 55.1 trips per 1,000 residents;
• Mexico City, which averages 5.5 trips per bike and 158.2 trips per 1,000 residents;
• Montreal, which averages 6.8 trips per bike and 113.8 trips per 1,000 residents;
• New York City, which averages 8.3 trips per bike and 42.7 trips per 1,000 residents;
• Paris, which averages 6.7 trips per bike and 38.4 trips per 1,000 residents; and
• Rio de Janeiro, which averages 6.9 trips per bike and 44.2 trips per 1,000 residents.

This is perhaps the most thorough and holistic guide to bike share that has been published to date and is well worth the read. And, as a bonus, to help cities, operators, and planners develop the best possible bike share programs, they have also created the nifty infographic below that sums up how to join the likes of Paris and Barcelona above and become a world-class bike share program.

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