More commuters than ever in Greater Boston are embracing Bluebikes on their daily trips to work, driven by a growing network of pickup stations, the introduction of e-bikes, and expanded discount programs. In just four years from 2020 to 2024, annual ridership increased by 2.7 million.
“We’ve seen the Bluebikes program explode in popularity, almost exponentially,” said Mandy Wilkens, a spokesperson for the Boston Cyclists Union, a local cycling advocacy group.
But the rising popularity isn’t as evident outside of the Boston city center and major college hubs. There are still gaps, particularly in less dense neighborhoods, such as Roxbury and Dorchester, which logged far fewer trips in comparison.
To understand how the bikeshare program has impacted the region, the Globe analyzed trip-level usage data from Bluebikes. The analysis was special to where riders left in the morning and returned in the evening to better capture commuter patterns.
Across the 13 municipalities served by the Bluebikes network, managed by the rideshare company Lyft, riders logged more than 4.7 million trips in 2024. Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville were among the leading use areas.
Bluebikes launched in 2011 with just 600 bicycles parked at 60 stations in a special section of Boston. today the program has more than 3,000 bikes at over 400 stations across the metro area.
Wilkens said one reason the trip numbers have surged recently is the addition of e-bikes, which have made the program more accessible to residents with disabilities or other mobility issues.
Despite the program’s rapid growth, stations in neighborhoods such as Dorchester and Mattapan logged surprisingly few commuter trips. Multiple stations reported fewer than 500 commuter trips in those areas from January 2024 through May 2025.
The map below shows how many commuter trips each Bluebikes station logged in that period. Many areas with robust public infrastructure and high population density, like Cambridge and Somerville, had significantly higher ridership.
In contrast, areas with lower urban density and fewer nearby Bluebikes stations have been slower to see upticks in usage.
“If you have to walk 15 minutes to go get a bike share, you’re less incentivized to do it,” said Galen Mook, executive director for MassBike, a cyclist advocacy organization.
Boston is about halfway through a two-year initiative to construct 100 new stations, said Kim Foltz, the bikes director at Boston Streets Cabinet, a division of the City of Boston that oversees transportation infrastructure.
The ultimate goal is to make the stations so common throughout the city that no one lives more than a five-minute walk from a pickup, she said.
The three busiest stations during peak commute hours were in the dense city of Cambridge, clustered near Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All three of those stations recorded more than 40,000 trips during commute times.
That high use number is driven in large part by Harvard and MIT students, who are offered steep discounts on Bluebikes memberships by their universities, advocates said.
Boston also offers a $60 membership for residents during their first year in the program and a $5 annual membership to low-income residents, suggesting that cost isn’t the sole factor behind the disparities.
Advocates point to more systemic issues that continue to deter residents in low-use areas from signing up.
“What’s the bigger issue is there is not as much safe infrastructure,” in areas such as Roxbury, Mattapan, and Dorchester, Wilkens, the cycling advocate, said.
Safe biking infrastructure can include everything from separated bike lanes and protected intersections to well-maintained road surfaces.
They added that those neighborhoods are too far from central commercial hubs for commuting by bike to be practical.
Mook, of MassBike, said Boston’s broader cycling strategy needs continued coordination and funding to close the remaining gaps.
“We definitely need to connect networks of safe cycling corridors,” he said. We must make sure “that we’re accelerating the puzzle pieces to make it a fully contiguous network.”
Scooty Nickerson can be reached at scooty.nickerson@globe.com.
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