For most of the last two decades, cycling policy in European cities has been a question of how to add more bike racks. The assumption was simple: most cyclists own a bike, and most cyclists need somewhere to lock it. The arrival of shared bikes has turned that assumption inside out.
A shared-bike fleet generates different parking demand than personal bikes. The bikes are dropped off and picked up in waves, concentrated in particular zones at particular times. They live shorter average dock-lives. And — critically — they get parked by people who are not the owner.
What that does to the kerb
Cities that started out with dockless shared schemes learned this the hard way. By 2020 most European city centres had a "bike clutter" problem: scooters on pavements, shared bikes blocking shop entrances, micromobility hardware tipped over on every kerb. The press wrote about it constantly. Most of the early operators handled it by paying for human "rebalancers" who walked the city tidying things up — which was expensive and didn't scale.
The eventual answer in most well-run cities has been dedicated mobility-hub parking. Not the old bike rack — those don't fit shared frames well and they're not big enough for fleet density. A modern mobility hub is a marked patch of pavement, usually 4–8m long, with low bollards, geofenced into the operator apps so the bike has to be parked there to end the trip.
Brussels as a case study
Brussels has done this better than most. The city redesigned its dedicated mobility-hub network across the centre over 2022–2023, working with all the major operators on a single shared spec. The result was a measurable drop in operator complaints, a faster turn-around time for shared bikes (they get picked up sooner after being dropped off, because the bike is where users expect it), and — crucially — a quieter politics around shared mobility in general.
The trade-off is space. A mobility hub takes pavement away from something else. Usually that something is private car parking, which makes the politics local and noisy. The cities that have done this well have made it part of a broader pedestrianisation plan, not pitched it as "anti-car".
What we'd want to see next
The next step is real-time availability data at hub level. Today, most cities and operators don't know which hubs are full, which are empty, and which have a broken bike sitting in them. We've started publishing this data through the SMOVECITY platform to the city of Brussels — full hubs show as red on the live map, empty hubs green, mixed hubs yellow. Operator rebalancing decisions can be informed by the same data the user sees. It's early days but the early signals are positive.
Two decades of bike-rack thinking taught us that parking is a fixed-asset problem. Shared mobility teaches us that it's a flow problem. The cities that figure out the flow part first will be the ones with the cleanest streets in a few years.