29 of the world’s largest bike-sharing programs in one map

New York’s new system is compact and dense. Washington DC’s is expansive and sparse. Seoul’s is bifurcated. Paris’s is comprehensive. The geographic footprint of a city’s bike-sharing system can reveal both the municipality’s level of commitment to transportation alternatives as well as the topography of the surrounding area.

The maps above show the locations of all docking stations for 29 bike-sharing programs around the world. They are drawn at the same scale and arranged by the number of docks. The data are drawn from Oliver O’Brien’s interactive maps, and the illustrations are inspired by Neil Freeman’s “Subway systems at the same scale.”

Not all of the major bike-sharing programs are included, mostly because details are scarce on many such systems in China. O’Brien notes China is said to be home to 17 of the world’s 20 largest bike-sharing systems, measured by the number of available bikes, including 4 that could be the largest in the world.