What If Bike Sharing Services Were Truly Designed for Families?
For a More Inclusive and Caring Mobility System
Bike sharing is now a vital piece of urban mobility. In cities such as Paris, London, Vienna, and Madrid, shared bikes have shifted commuting patterns and enabled millions of people to embrace low-carbon travel. They are convenient, efficient, sustainable — and widely seen as a service “for everyone.”
But in practice, most bike-sharing systems are designed around a narrow archetype: a solo, able-bodied adult with predictable schedules and few constraints. This “default user” implicitly shapes everything from hardware to pricing, from rebalancing algorithms to app interfaces.
The result is that a vast segment of everyday urban mobility remains underserved: family and caregiving mobility.
Why it matters
Family mobility extends far beyond the nuclear household.
It represents a large, diverse, interdependent ecosystem of people whose mobility patterns are multi-stop, time-sensitive, and instrumental to the functioning of urban life.
Supporting them is good urban policy and good business.
Written with Jump Seat Strategies, this paper outlines how we think bike sharing could evolve into a more inclusive, family-aware service.
As Parisiens, we hope this is the beginning of a conversation not only in our city, but in others trying to build a more family-friendly bikeshare scheme.