Oslo Bysykkel launched in April 2019 with 292 stations across the inner city. The debut season attracted over two million trips, a high-water mark for a city that had never had city bikes before.
COVID-19 lockdowns emptied city streets in spring 2020. Ridership fell by nearly a quarter. People still cycled, but far fewer of them.
Paradoxically, ridership fell further as the city reopened. Even the pandemic year's 1.7M couldn't be matched. Many first-time riders from 2019 simply didn't come back. A structural shift, not a temporary dip.
By 2023 the decline had stabilised. Around one million trips per year (roughly half the 2019 peak) represents the network's committed, regular user base.
Oslo's bike season is strikingly short. In 2019, nearly all trips happened between May and October. The January–March period is almost silent across every year in the data.
Each year follows the same arc: a sharp spring ramp in April–May, a broad summer plateau, then a rapid autumn retreat. The shape is remarkably consistent, even as total volumes have changed.
The shaded band marks June, July, and August: Oslo's golden cycling window. Trip counts in this period are roughly three to four times higher than in the quietest winter months.
With all years overlaid, the consistency is striking. What changes year to year is only the scale; the shape barely changes. Oslo's cycling rhythm is deeply tied to its seasons.
Left: Minutes / Trips toggle (top-left), then hover bars. Right: 4×4 scatter matrix — hover a cell; click to enlarge — Back or Esc returns.
On ordinary weekdays (Mon–Fri, not a public holiday), the tallest bars sit in the morning commute, midday, and afternoon commute buckets. The left chart splits starts into Oslo time buckets; each bar is total riding time from trips that start in that bucket, averaged per calendar day in that weekday, weekend, or holiday slice.
Saturday and Sunday smooth the two rush spikes: more riding in the middle of the day and in the evening, less in narrow peaks. A weekday that is a Norwegian public holiday reads closer to a Saturday than to a normal Monday: the commute-shaped bars shrink and the rest of the day carries more of the total.
The four bar colours split weekday vs weekend and holiday vs not. Minutes and Trips only change the vertical scale.
The right chart is a 4×4 matrix of the same calendar days: rain and temperature at Blindern, trip count, and mean trip length in minutes. Off-diagonal cells plot two measures against each other; the diagonal names the axis. One dot is one day; stacked dots read darker.
Everything is network-wide for that date, not “rides that began in the rain.” A wet day can line up with shorter or longer typical trips for many overlapping reasons.
The strip below is trip starts by clock hour in Oslo. Solid blue and solid teal lines are average riding minutes per day from trips that start in that hour (weekday Mon–Fri vs weekend Sat–Sun). Dashed lines in the same colours use the right-hand scale: average trips per day by start hour, so you can line up how often people leave with how many minutes those hours add.
Each trip is counted in its start hour only, so very long rides do not spread across the hours they span; hourly sums can fall short of whole-network minutes for the day.
Hover a station for departures, arrivals, and net flow.
Oslo Bysykkel has over 200 docking stations spread across the city. Each dot on the map represents one station. The size reflects how busy it is: bigger dots mean more total trips.
Not all stations are equal. Blue stations send more bikes out than they receive; they're departure hubs, where journeys begin. Red stations receive more bikes than they send; they're where bikes end up.
This imbalance is a daily challenge for the operators, who rebalance the fleet with vans overnight.
Storo Storsenter sits next to Storo T-bane station in one of Oslo's fastest-growing residential districts. Commuters grab a city bike here to continue their journey into the centre, far more bikes leave than arrive.
Torggata is a pedestrianised street at the heart of Oslo's nightlife and restaurant scene. Cyclists arrive from across the city for work, lunch, or an evening out, but rarely cycle back. That one-way flow makes it Oslo's biggest net arrival point.
Hover a route for distance, time, and trip counts; hover a station for its name.
Each line shows an actual bike route between two stations, calculated using the city's cycling network. Together they trace the skeleton of how Oslo moves on two wheels.
Hover over any line to see origin, destination, distance and estimated ride time.
The highlighted routes are the most frequently used short connections in the network: compact urban trips, typically under 2 km, that fit neatly into a commute or lunch break.
These are the arteries of Oslo's cycling city.
The busiest routes cluster tightly in central Oslo and the western harbour area. These short, flat connections are ideal for city bikes: no hills, no long distances, just effortless urban movement.
Multiplying trip count by ride duration reveals which corridors account for the most total cycling time. These are not necessarily the most frequent routes; longer rides to more distant destinations contribute disproportionate hours.
Highlighted in teal are the routes where Osloans have collectively spent the most time in the saddle: not the most frequent, but the ones where long distances add up to outsized hours.
City bikes are Oslo's fastest, cheapest way to cross the city.
Every trip is one less car on the road.
Aggregates and map layers are built from open data spanning roughly April 2019–January 2026 (trips and daily weather aligned by date).