London’s hire bikes, followed one by one: 9 million hires and 427,000 moves without one

One Thursday: 31,945 hires, and 1,464 that began at a different dock

Each moving light is a hire, drawn straight from dock to dock (the rider took the streets). A dashed blue line appears when a hire begins at a different dock from where that bike was last left: it joins the two docks. It appears at the moment of the new hire; the bike was moved some time before.

In the morning most hires end in the City and the West End. Between 8 and 10 o’clock, 344 dashed lines appear: watch which way they point.

One time in 21, a bike’s next hire began somewhere else

Across the year 13,474 bikes made 9,091,864 hires. Between one hire and the next, a bike should stay where its last rider docked it. 427,191 times it did not: the next hire began at another dock, and no hire in the files took it there.

That is one gap between hires in 21, or about 32 times a year for the average bike. Only 47 bikes never changed dock this way.

E-bikes, 19% of hires, changed dock between hires less often: 3.8 times per 100 hires, against 4.9 for pedal bikes.

Where riders leave more bikes than they take

Over a year, the busiest docks do not balance. The City and the West End receive more bikes than they send out: the two Queen Street docks by Bank received 74,236 and sent out 55,609.

Waterloo’s three docks are the opposite: 126,631 hires began there and 109,496 ended there. Waterloo Station 3 alone is the busiest dock in London. Filled circles mark docks where riders bring more than they take; open circles, docks they empty.

The bikes moved without a hire go the other way

Count only the clearest moves: the next hire within a day and at least 300 metres away. There were 212,495 of them.

They leave the docks riders fill and arrive at the docks riders empty. The Queen Street docks lost 10,893 bikes this way and gained 530. Waterloo’s three docks gained 22,811.

Half of these arrivals are at just 59 of the 805 docks.

They run against the flow of riders

Of the clearest moves, 76% went from a dock where riders leave a surplus to a dock riders empty, and 5% went the other way.

Hires between two docks at least 300 metres apart split almost evenly between those two directions: 24% and 27%. The rest, 49%, connect two docks of the same kind.

This also limits how much a gap in the files could explain. A hire missing from the files would show up here as a move. If missing hires go the way published hires do, then even if every move from a dock riders empty to a dock riders fill were a missing hire, missing hires could be at most about 18% of the clearest moves.

Moved mostly by day

The files give only a window: the time the bike was docked and the time it was next hired. On weekdays, bikes that were later moved were most often docked between 8 and 9 in the morning; 59% were docked between 7 and 10.

For 58% of the clearest moves, the whole window lay between 7 in the morning and 9 at night on the same day. For 4%, the bike was docked in the evening and next hired the following morning. In 42% of them, the bike was hired again within six hours of being docked.

Waterloo’s docks, refilled

22,811 times a bike reached Waterloo’s three docks by the clearest kind of move: about 18 for every 100 hires that began there. In the other direction there were 9,131.

The largest numbers came from Storey’s Gate (Westminster), Warwick Row (Westminster) and Fore Street Avenue (Guildhall).

In 2010 TfL told the London Assembly that Serco, the operator, had 48 redistribution staff, and that ten more were being trained to stand at specific docks for the morning and evening peaks. The files do not say whether that still happens at Waterloo.

One bike’s year: 1,493 hires at 611 docks

The busiest bike in the files was hired 1,493 times between 3 June 2025 and 31 May 2026, about 4.1 times a day.

It stood at 611 different docks, about three in every four in the network. 44 times its next hire began somewhere other than where it had been left, at any distance; the dashed lines on the map.

Some bikes are gone for days

77,147 of the moves (18%) came after the bike had been absent from the files for three days or more. The files do not say why: a repair, storage or a dock that closed are all possible.

1,013 hires ended at TfL’s two mechanical workshops, in Penton and Clapham, the only workshops that appear in the files.

Long absences ended most often at Waterloo Station 3 (Waterloo), Argyle Street (Kings Cross) and Hyde Park Corner (Hyde Park).

What the files cannot tell

They never say who moved a bike, or how: by van, by trailer or ridden by staff outside the hire system. No current TfL figure for the number of bikes moved was found. The latest official figures found are from 2010, when TfL told the London Assembly that Serco had 48 redistribution staff providing 24-hour cover and 31 vehicles.

290,143 hire numbers in the year, 3.1% of the sequence, are absent from the files. If some were rides between two docks, they would appear here as moves. They turn up in every hour of the day, between 1.9 and 3.5 per 100 hires from 6 in the morning to 11 at night, and very short hires are not filtered out: 49,691 published hires lasted under 30 seconds.

Neighbouring docks are another source of doubt. 38,208 moves were under 300 metres, such as between Waterloo’s three docks; the clearest count leaves them out.

Barcelona’s hire bikes pile up for another reason: they roll downhill to the sea.