Santander Cycles: Demand and Station Rebalancing
Transport (TfL)
Where is Santander Cycles demand most imbalanced across London, and how should bikes be rebalanced?
Santander Cycles is London’s public bike share scheme, run by TfL. A rebalancing team has to physically move bikes between stations every day, since riders don’t naturally return bikes to where they’re needed. This project analyses 1.67 million real trips from April and May 2026, loaded into DuckDB straight from TfL’s own S3 bucket, to answer the question a network planning team would actually ask.
Findings
Demand follows a textbook commute pattern on weekdays, with sharp peaks at 8am and 5 to 6pm (the evening peak is the larger of the two), and a single broad midday hump on weekends that looks like leisure riding rather than commuting.
Station imbalance follows the commute, not chance. Stations that fill up with bikes over the day are almost all in the City of London financial district (Bank, Liverpool Street, Moorgate, Holborn, Monument). Stations that drain are major rail termini and park areas (both Waterloo Station docks, Hyde Park Corner, Knightsbridge, Lancaster Gate).
E-bikes, already 19% of trips, are used differently from classic bikes. They average a longer trip and are used for a round trip (same start and end station, typical of a leisure loop) less than half as often as classic bikes, 1.9% versus 3.2%, pointing to more genuine point-to-point commuting.
Live dashboard
Full write-up
- Full report — methodology, limitations, and recommendations
- SQL and notebook on GitHub