TOP STORIES 🔥

🚲 A Bet on Bikes in the World's Cycling Capital

Copenhagen’s modern history with shared micromobility starts with Bycyklen. Launched in 2012 with e-bikes, docking stations, and touchscreen interfaces, it was genuinely innovative. It was also costly to develop, struggled with lower-than-expected demand, and eventually went bankrupt, leaving the city without a public bike-share system. The gap was filled by private operators. Donkey Republic, founded in Copenhagen in 2014, became the city's main bike-sharing provider after winning 2,075 of the 3,200 available city permits — a local company filling a void left by a failed public investment.

On the scooter side, Copenhagen was briefly a major market. Voi launched there in 2019 and described the city as one of its largest globally between 2019 and 2021, with millions of rides completed each year. Then the city tightened its grip: parking restrictions swept across large parts of the centre, limiting where scooters could be left and effectively making free-floating operations unviable. Voi exited at the end of 2023. Other operators followed or scaled back. Copenhagen had made its position clear: shared mobility was welcome, but on the city's terms, not the operator's.

A strategic return

The come back to Copenhagen in May 2026 is a different proposition. Rather than e-scooters, Voi arrives with up to 4,500 shared e-bikes — the largest private dockless e-bike deployment in the Danish capital to date. The move is deliberate. Unlike scooters, e-bikes fit naturally within Copenhagen’s deeply rooted cycling culture. They require far less political capital to justify and operate within a regulatory framework that, while still demanding, is considerably less contentious than the scooter rules that ultimately pushed Voi out of the city.

Øystein Rikheim Sundelin, Voi's Senior Policy Manager, framed the return in terms of fit rather than conquest: "Copenhagen is one of the world's great cycling cities which is exactly why we believe shared e-bikes fit in so naturally here. They give both residents and visitors an easy and flexible option for getting around the city and work well alongside both private bikes and public transport." On the lessons from the scooter exit, he was equally measured, stressing the need for "practical dialogue" between operators and cities — language that reads, between the lines, as an acknowledgement that Voi's first stint in Copenhagen ended on terms it hadn't fully anticipated.

The company has not abandoned scooters entirely. Sundelin confirmed that Voi aims to eventually bring e-scooters back to Copenhagen, but only "depending on the city's regulatory framework" — a cautious framing that suggests no imminent moves.

The real question: what's the market?

Here's the paradox any operator entering Copenhagen must grapple with. This is a city where 62% of residents commute by bike daily, 9 out of 10 Copenhageners own a bicycle, and private cycling generates around 408 million journeys a year. It has invested over €170 million in cycling infrastructure over the past decade. In most European cities, shared bikes fill the gap for people who don't own one, in Copenhagen, almost everyone already does.

The track record is sobering. Bycyklen — the city's publicly subsidised e-bike scheme launched in 2014 as a "fourth component of public transportation" — grew from 169,000 rides in 2015 to 933,000 by 2016, sustained by €1.10 million in annual public funding. It wasn't enough. Its bike importer went bankrupt in 2017, the system was restructured, and Bycyklen itself filed for bankruptcy at the end of 2022. Even a well-funded, purpose-built e-bike system couldn't generate sustainable ridership in a city where cycling is already the default.

The gap was filled by Donkey Republic, now operating alongside Dott. Neither dominates. The market exists — tourists, residents between bikes, longer cross-town trips where e-assist matters — but it is structurally narrower than anywhere else in Europe.

That's the niche Voi's 4,500 e-bikes are targeting. It is not the daily commuter, it is the occasional user, the visitor or the tourist. Whether that market is large enough to justify the investment is the question Voi's Copenhagen comeback will eventually answer.

🧐 Key Insights from the 2025 European Shared Mobility Index

Public bike ridership reaches 239 million trips :

🥇 Paris: Vélib' recorded 48.5 million trips, keep its crown as Europe's largest bike-sharing system by some distance.

📈 BiciMAD surged to 13.75 million trips in its first full year after expansion

🇬🇧 London: Santander Cycles recorded just 9 million trips, but TfL awarded Lyft Urban Solutions and Serco a new £220 million contract to expand the service - watch this space.

Learn more about public bike-share and other modes reading our 2025 European Shared Mobility Index 👇

🔒 Cooltra Goes Docked

Ontinyent's electric bike-share scheme Ontibici is relaunching today — and the story is less about the city than about the operator running it. Cooltra, best known for free-floating moped-sharing across Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, and Paris, is taking over the Ontibici service with a station-based model. Sixty e-bikes, docking infrastructure, subscription-based access. It is a rare thing in 2026: a genuine new dock-based system, launched by an operator whose entire DNA was free-floating.

The context matters. Ontibici's previous concession was awarded to Movus, who declined to cover the gap with the second contract, leaving the city without a functioning bike-share for 6 months. Cooltra stepped in with the new concession, a modernised fleet, and a model that looks nothing like its core business: 57 bikes accross 8 physical and 19 virtual stations, allocated to subscribed residents, annual passes at €15 with the first 30 minutes free, monthly passes at €5.

A consortium built on specialisation

The technology stack behind Ontibici is a deliberate choice. Cooltra assembled a three-partner consortium — OEMbikes for hardware, Noval for station infrastructure, Urban Sharing for the software platform — rather than turning to a single integrated provider. Camille Loth, Cooltra's B2G Manager, explains the logic: "What seemed particularly interesting to us was working with actors specialised in each of the three main components of a bike-share system — the bike, the station, and the software — each with very solid references at their level, rather than a single company offering all three."

The decision to use Urban Sharing's white-label platform rather than Cooltra's own free-floating software was equally deliberate. "The expectations of public bike-share are different," Loth notes, "and since we're talking about white-label solutions, it seemed quite natural to work with a specialist like Urban Sharing." The three partners have already worked together previously, which matters: the integration complexity of combining three separate systems is real, but the consortium arrives at Ontinyent with a solution that has already been road-tested.

Beyond opportunism: a medium-term B2G strategy

Cooltra has been building toward this for longer than Ontinyent might suggest. Loth joined the company at the end of 2022 with a specific mandate to develop the public bike-share segment. "This goes well beyond a simple opportunity," he says. "This launch is part of a medium-term strategy that is simply beginning to bear fruit."

The group's existing footprint — 15,000 free-floating vehicles across 20 European cities in 7 countries, covering scooters and bikes from per-minute rental to monthly subscriptions, for private users, businesses, and local authorities — is the platform on which the B2G offer is being built. "The public bike-share market is a natural continuation for the group, very complementary and connected to existing B2C and B2B activities," Loth explains. The local operational synergies are the core argument: a Cooltra city team already managing a free-floating fleet can absorb a public bike-share contract without duplicating infrastructure.

Earlier in 2026, Cooltra launched what Loth describes as "the first fully public long-term rental service in the Spanish market" in Manresa — powered in part by Kleta, the subscription cycling company Cooltra recently acquired. Ontinyent follows with a different model but the same strategic logic: expanding the group's public sector footprint city by city, in Spain first, then across the other European markets where Cooltra already operates.

The demand baseline in Ontinyent justifies the bet. In the first quarter of 2024, the service recorded an average of 3,679 monthly uses — around 120 trips per day — for a city of 35,000 inhabitants. Modest in absolute terms, but a meaningful utilisation rate for a small Spanish municipality, and enough to make the case for a properly operated service.

Station-based systems have been retreating across Europe for years, gradually giving way to virtual hubs and free-floating models. The trend has been unmistakable: fewer docks, more app-based flexibility, and less reliance on heavy civil infrastructure. Ontinyent is a small but deliberate counterpoint. And Cooltra is making the argument that docks still have a place where density is low and predictability matters more than flexibility. For a company that built its reputation on the freedom to park anywhere, that's a meaningful shift.

LAUNCHES & EXPANSIONS 🚀

Cooltra
Launch in Ontinyent (ES) 🚲 (60)

Dott
Expansion in West of England (GB) 🚲&🛴
Launch in …

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PAUSES & EXITS ⛔️

nextbike
Exit from Olomouc (CZ) 🚲

EasyBike
Exit from Nea Smyrni (GR) 🚲

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CITY UPDATES 🌐

Antwerpen (BE) | A local hospital wants to ban shared electric scooters at night.

Askøy (NO) | New fleet cap at 250 vehicles has been adopted for shared scooters.

Subscribe to premium to reveal 6 more city updates.

INDUSTRY NEWS 🗞️

Bolt explores helmet rental solutions to answer mandatory helmet law for scooter riders in Latvia (LV).

Dégage! celebrates 400th car available in its Ghent network, and plans to reach 1,000 by 2030.

Dott expands in the West of England, and introduces new pricing plans.

Rekola is suffering from high vandalism rates in Most (CZ).

Voi opens a new Voi House in Paris (FR).

Bike subscription service leader Swapfiets acquires its competitor Dance.