in an increasing number of cities/agglomerations, rental bicycle systems can be found. private providers and provider communities make bicycles available for joint or alternating use in the spirit of the sharing economy. both station-based systems and free-floating approaches are used. often the offers are limited to the city centres, sometimes there are closed (sub)systems in peripheral and/or island locations. depending on the municipality, there are one or sometimes several providers/operators of rental bicycles. the market of providers is growing continuously. in Berlin, there were meanwhile eight providers offering their rental bicycles in parallel and competing with each other, in September 2018 there are six operators.

The Agora Verkehrswende addressed the political and administrative handling of rental bicycles in cities in its publication "Bikesharing im Wandel - Handlungsempfehlungen für deutsche Städte und Gemeinden zum Umgang mit stationslosen Systemen" (Bikesharing in Change - Recommendations for German Cities and Municipalities on How to Handle Stationless Systems), where it is correctly stated that "[d]he real benefits of the new systems for the urban transport system are currently difficult to measure empirically" (p. 13). Consequently, a study of the available data on bike sharing and its analysis will supplement the qualitative statements made so far.

Within the scope of this project I record for the first time for the German capital and as far as data accessibility is guaranteed, how many rental bikes of the different operators are available to the users. GIShow densely the wheels clump or spread, how far away from stations they are and whether they move or stop and are not used during certain periods of time.

For a planned brochure, I will support the visualization with draft maps and diagrams and provide the corresponding text modules for data analysis.