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Dublin Bikes scheme is to be stopped and replaced by council
Dublin City Council is planning to replace the current Dublin Bikes scheme with a significantly expanded city-wide public bike system from 2027, including up to 4,000 bikes and a major increase in e-bikes.
A report prepared for councillors on the Mobility and Public Realm Strategic Policy Committee confirms that the existing Dublin Bikes contract with JCDecaux will end in September 2027, after almost two decades in operation. The council has said it intends to begin a procurement process for a successor scheme that would operate across the entire Dublin City Council area.
The current Dublin Bikes scheme, launched in 2009, consists of 1,600 bikes and 115 docking stations located largely within the canal cordon. Operated by JCDecaux under the Red Click Dublin Bikes brand, the service allows annual subscribers to make unlimited journeys of up to 30 minutes for an annual fee of €35.
However, Dublin City Council noted in the report that it does not own either the bicycles or the docking infrastructure under the present arrangement.
Under the proposed replacement model, the local authority is considering taking ownership of the docking stations and potentially the bikes themselves, while appointing a contractor to operate, maintain and upgrade the system.
The report states that the council envisages a single operator managing the scheme city-wide, with a mix of traditional bicycles and e-bikes forming a fleet of around 4,000 bikes — more than double the size of the existing Dublin Bikes network.
The council also confirmed that it is not currently planning to include e-scooters in the new scheme.
Alongside Dublin Bikes, private operators Bleeper and Moby currently run stationless bike-sharing services under licence from Dublin City Council, providing about 900 additional bikes that must be parked at cycle stands. Unlike Dublin Bikes, those services do not include free usage periods.
Dublin City Council said it will engage in market-sounding exercises with bike-share operators before formally beginning the procurement process. Councillors are also to be invited to a workshop on the future of bike sharing in Dublin.
Dublin Bikes was launched in September 2009 and quickly became one of the most visible public transport initiatives in the capital. Introduced during the tenure of then Dublin lord mayor Emer Costello, the scheme was initially seen as an experiment in urban cycling but rapidly exceeded expectations, with tens of thousands of subscribers signing up within its first year.
The original scheme was developed and operated by outdoor advertising giant JCDecaux under a deal with Dublin City Council. In exchange for running the bike-sharing system, JCDecaux secured rights to operate advertising infrastructure across the city, including billboards and street furniture. Similar public bike models linked to advertising contracts were rolled out by JCDecaux in cities including Paris, Lyon and Brussels.
At launch, the scheme consisted of 450 bikes and 40 stations concentrated around the city centre. It later expanded to 1,600 bikes and 115 stations, stretching from Heuston Station to the Docklands and from Phibsborough to Portobello.
The scheme’s first commercial sponsor was the credit card company Discover Ireland, though branding was relatively limited in the early years. In 2014, Coca-Cola Zero became the title sponsor in a high-profile commercial partnership that rebranded the service as “Coca-Cola Zero dublinbikes”. That sponsorship deal ran for several years and significantly increased the visibility of the scheme internationally.
In 2023, the scheme was rebranded again as “Red Click Dublin Bikes” following a sponsorship agreement with RedClick, a subsidiary of eir focused on digital advertising technology.
Dublin Bikes is widely regarded as one of the more successful urban bike-share schemes in Europe in terms of usage rates. Before the pandemic, it regularly recorded more than four million journeys annually and played a major role in normalising commuter cycling in Dublin.
The scheme has also faced operational pressures in recent years, including aging infrastructure, capacity shortages at peak times and criticism that the network remained too concentrated within the canals while Dublin’s cycling infrastructure expanded further into the suburbs.
