Station Overview

The Vélib’ network includes over 1,400 stations across Paris and extends into nearly 45 surrounding cities. With such dense coverage, Vélib offers convenient and sustainable mobility for both daily commuters and occasional riders.

The visualization below lets you explore the distribution of all Vélib’ stations. Each circle represents a station and is grouped first by city, and then by arrondissement within Paris.

The size of each circle reflects the station’s capacity — the number of bikes it can accommodate. The larger the circle, the bigger the station.

This interactive graph gives you a visual overview of Vélib’s presence throughout the Paris area, highlighting how deeply embedded bike-sharing has become in the urban landscape.

Pulse of Paris

Dive into the bustling rhythm of Paris with this immersive data experience centered around the Vélib' bike-sharing system. At the heart of this visualization is a full-screen map of the city, where each station is represented as a vibrant circle, its color and size revealing the density of available bikes throughout the day.

As the clock ticks from 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM on Thursday, March 13, use the interactive slider to watch the city’s bike activity come alive. With each passing hour, the map evolves, stations pulsing with new data, highlighting the dynamic patterns of urban mobility.

On the right, a live-updating Top 10 chart displays the busiest stations in terms of total bike availability, with a visual breakdown between mechanical and electric bikes. Click on any station’s bar to zoom in on the map and explore it further.

Once a station is selected, the interface transforms: the total chart fades out, and new graphs appear. One shows the hourly evolution of bike availability at the station. The other, a compact dashboard, breaks down the station's key indicators—bike type, density, and availability—at the selected hour.

Want to go back? Just double-click anywhere on the map to reset the view, return to the full dataset, and bring back the Top 10 overview.

This tool is more than just a map. It’s a responsive exploration of how Parisians move, station by station, hour by hour. From morning peaks to evening slowdowns, discover the pulse of the city as told by its bikes.

Arrondissement Dynamics

This visualization highlights the evolution of average bike availability throughout the day for each Paris arrondissement. The data is grouped by color to reveal three distinct usage patterns.

Pink arrondissements — mostly central districts like the 1st to 9th — follow a classic commuter dynamic, with a noticeable drop in available bikes around 8–9AM, followed by a gradual recovery later in the day.

Orange zones display a stable trend, where bike availability remains relatively constant throughout the day, suggesting local or evenly spread usage.

Blue arrondissements — such as the 18th, 19th, and 20th — show a steady decline in availability during working hours, reflecting outbound movement as users leave these residential areas in the morning.

This graph offers a clear view of how bike usage behaviors shift across neighborhoods, revealing the diverse rhythms of urban mobility in Paris.