The rhythm of the day

The dots moving behind this card are the day's rides, each along a likely route; the switch next to the clock narrows them to the ones whose bike reported its position all the way. The small chart up there is the same as this one: click anywhere on it to jump to that moment. The day has a clear beat: a sharp rush home on Wednesday evening, a quiet night, and an even sharper rush in on Thursday morning.

At the busiest quarter-hour on Wednesday evening, 2,288 rides began. In the quietest one, around Thursday 03:00, just 44 did, about 52 times fewer.

Over the day we counted 81,504 rides on 20,343 different bikes.

Short hops, mostly

A typical ride lasted about 13 minutes and used roughly 3.2 km of battery range. Half of all rides were shorter than that.

Nine in ten rides were over within 34 minutes, and about half started and ended in the same borough.

Where rides begin and end

The green dots are the busiest spots to pick up or drop a bike. The biggest is outside Waterloo station; the next are Shepherd's Bush, Tottenham Court Road and St Pancras.

Stations matter a lot. 59% of rides started or ended within about a three-minute walk of a railway or Tube station. If the same number of rides had been scattered across the streets at random, that figure would be around 28%.

The small grey dots are the 666 stations we counted. Zoom in to look around.

Morning out, evening home

Each square is half a kilometre across. Red squares are places where rides tend to leave in the morning and arrive in the evening: where people live. Green squares are the reverse: where people go for the day.

The deep green block over the City of London and Holborn is where Wednesday's evening rides left from and Thursday's morning rides arrived. The red ring around it, from Hackney round to Clapham and Wandsworth, is where those rides came home.

Hover or tap a square for its numbers. Paler squares had fewer rides.

Borough by borough

Darker boroughs saw more rides. Westminster led with 15,394 rides starting or ending inside it, then Southwark, Wandsworth and Lambeth. The bikes are only offered in some boroughs, which is why the outer ring is pale or empty.

Over the whole day, bikes mostly came back to where they started: in every busy borough the number of rides starting and the number ending were within a few percent of each other.

Hover or tap a borough for its counts.

The roads they rode

For 1,799 rides the bike reported its position the whole way, so we could work out the likely streets it took. Those rides are drawn here: the darker and thicker a road, the more of them used it.

The busiest stretches run along Park Lane past Hyde Park Corner, over London Bridge, and through Holborn and Chancery Lane into the City.

These rides tend to be shorter and more central than the average ride, so treat this as a sketch of the busiest routes rather than a complete picture.

On the cycleways

The red lines are Transport for London's signed cycle routes. About 25% of the distance those followed rides covered was on one of them, roughly 1.9× what you would expect from how much of the road network they make up.

57% of the followed rides used a cycleway for at least a hundred metres in one go. The most used were Cycleway 3 along the Embankment, Cycle Superhighway 7 through Clapham and Elephant & Castle, and Cycleway 6 from Farringdon to Elephant & Castle.

Keeping the batteries topped up

Behind the scenes, a team collects bikes whose batteries have run down. On this day that happened 4,283 times.

The rule is clear: bikes are collected once their battery falls to 50%, almost never before, and come back with a median charge of 97%. A third came back completely full.

Moving bikes around

Vans also move bikes from where they pile up to where they are wanted. 2,009 bikes were moved on this day, a typical move being about 4 km.

Red squares lost bikes to the vans, green squares gained them. The busiest pick-up point was Waterloo, where bikes pile up after the morning rush. They were dropped off in a ring just outside the centre: Southwark, Bermondsey, Islington, Wandsworth.

Click or tap a square to see where its bikes went or came from.

How this snapshot was made

Forest's app shows where its bikes are parked. For a little over a day we noted those positions once a minute. When a bike disappeared from one spot and reappeared somewhere else, we counted a ride. No rider is identified in any of this: there are only bikes and places.

A small share of bikes kept reporting their position while they were being ridden, and those 1,799 rides gave us the routes. Everything else is based on where rides started and ended.

The "all rides" view of the animation draws each of the other rides along a likely street route worked out by a routing program from where it began and ended. To keep those places private, the first and last 100 metres of every such path are left out, and rides too short to show anything are skipped.

Because it is a single weekday in July, from one company's bikes, during a period when the app happened to show rides this way, it is a snapshot. Other days, seasons and bike schemes will look different.

Map tiles by Esri, with data from OpenStreetMap contributors. Cycle routes from Transport for London open data. Borough boundaries from the ONS. Routes matched to streets with Valhalla. Code and analysis: github.com/athuler/LondonCycleshareMap.