It hasn’t taken long for Portland to embrace bike share. Just 24 hours after it launched yesterday Biketown is already getting lots of praise from users on social media and in the streets. And the initial statistics back up the enthusiasm.

Not everyone is a fan of course, but I’ve visited a few dozen stations already and everyone I’ve talked to has had a positive reaction. Now we have our first glimpse of data to see how the system is doing.

According to numbers released by Biketown’s operator Motivate Inc. today (at our request), there have been 2,366 trips taken on the system since it was launched yesterday at 11:30 am.

Here are the numbers in more detail (as of 11:00 am or so) along with some other fun stats:

Trips taken: 2227

Trips per bike: 2.30

Average Trip Length: 1.63 miles

Average Trip Duration: 22 minutes

Miles traveled: 3,623 miles


It’s still very early and the numbers will get more useful once we’ve got a full month of data — but we can’t resist doing a bit of comparison.

So far Portland’s bikes get more rides per day than the ones in Minneapolis’ Nice Ride system got after five years in service. Nice ride, which has much lower station density that Portland, got 1.6 trips per bike per day on average in 2014 (source: NACTO). On the other end of the scale, Chicago’s Divvy bike share system and Citi Bike in New York City got 3.8 and 5.2 trips per bike in that year, respectively.

From a membership perspective, Biketown seems to be doing quite well. 1,252 annual memberships have been sold since they went on sale June 14th. Contrast that with Seattle’s bike share system which had 1,154 members at the end of its first full month post-launch.

Dani Simons, director of communications for Biketown’s operator Motivate Inc., said they’re happy with the initial numbers. “It was a strong first day in terms of ridership and we look forward to trying to build from here.”

How is Biketown treating you? We’re following many different bike share story threads and we’d love to hear your feedback. Feel free to email, Tweet, text or whatever else to share your thoughts. And follow our ongoing Biketown coverage here and on Twitter @BikePortland.

NOTE: We updated the 24-hour data on this post at 1:20 pm July 21st after we received more detailed numbers from Motivate. Sorry for any confusion.



— Jonathan Maus, (503) 706-8804 – jonathan@bikeportland.org

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