Bicing and the hill: why Barcelona’s shared bikes end up by the sea

A city on a slope#

Barcelona climbs from the beach to Collserola. The lowest Bicing station sits 2 metres above the sea, the highest at 184 metres, on Av. Jordà, 18. Each dot on the map is a station, coloured by its height.

Most of the network is low: 42% of the docks are below 20 metres and only 10% above 90. But people live up the hill too, in Gràcia, Horta, Sarrià and Nou Barris, and leave from there in the morning.

Why the top stations empty: a simple model#

Five stations on a slope, ten bikes each. Riders take a bike wherever they are and ride to any other station, in any direction. One rule is added: on a manual bike, the bigger the climb to the destination, the more likely the rider gives up and takes the metro. Going down, nobody gives up.

Press play. Every trip down happens and many trips up don’t, so each day a few more bikes end up at the bottom. Then add e-bikes and the night vans and see what Bicing can do about it.

The model shows the mechanism. Its numbers are not Barcelona’s.

A September weekday, hour by hour#

Barcelona City Council publishes the state of every station every few minutes. September 2026 holds 8,328 readings of the whole network over 29 days. The map shows the average weekday, hour by hour.

At six in the morning, stations above 90 metres are 27% full. By nine the middle slopes, between 20 and 60 metres, have lost about half their bikes, in the hours when people leave for work. At seven in the evening the stations above 90 metres are 6% full, and half of the readings (50%) find no bike at all. Below 20 metres, stations stay about half full all day.

This is not an average hiding very different days. On every one of the 29 days, at seven in the evening, the stations below 20 metres were 5.5 to 14.1 times fuller than those above 90 metres.

weekday, September 2026 average

Who takes them back up#

Above 40 metres, on a weekday, the number of docked bikes falls from 1,340 at six in the morning to 357 at seven in the evening: a drop of 73%. Between midnight and five, the same stations get back about 500. In 2022 Bicing had 30 redistribution vans in three shifts, one of them at night; the night gain fits that shift, though some of it is late riders going home.

Nearly two thirds (64%) of the bikes that appear up there in those hours are e-bikes. And people who ride uphill choose the e-bike: a study of 53 million Bicing trips from 2019–2022 found that on trips climbing more than 100 metres, e-bikes dominate completely. And the manual bikes stay down: 81% of those docked in the evening are below 20 metres, where only 42% of the docks are. For e-bikes the share is 40%.

Is it the hill, or just the centre?#

The bottom is also the centre: Ciutat Vella, the Eixample, the beach, the offices. Maybe the bikes go to the centre and the hill just happens to be far away. The chart separates the two: each dot is a station, placed by its height and by how full it is at seven in the evening, coloured by its distance from Plaça de Catalunya.

Among stations at the same distance from the centre, the higher ones are emptier, in every ring (correlations from −0.64 to −0.81). At the same height, stations farther out are no emptier. Every 10 metres of height means on average 4.2 percentage points less in the evening. The heights are the operator’s; an independent terrain model gives almost the same values (correlation 0.99) and the same result.

Your station, now and on a usual day#

Tap a station on the map, search by street or neighbourhood, or use where you are. You see how many bikes it has now, manual and electric, and what a usual weekday looks like there.