GIRA Bike-Share

🤖 AI-generated summary · 🔎 Last verified 2026-08-07

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means

GIRA's bikes report their own location and battery charge in real time — but by 2025 barely a third of the fleet the app promised was actually on the street.

Outcome🔄 Ongoing

Evidence🏛️ Official

what does this mean?

The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →

Run byEMEL (Empresa Municipal de Mobilidade e Estacionamento de Lisboa)

Scale🏙️ City-wide

Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 6 more in Lisbon · 🚲 Cycling guide · 🚲 Mobility projects

EMEL's docked bike-share opened with 10 stations in Parque das Nações in September 2017 and now spans all 24 Lisbon parishes. Bikes carry GPS units; the app shows live per-station availability and e-bike battery level, and a Cabo Ruivo command centre uses that data to dispatch rebalancing vans.

Live 📅 since 2017

📊 Impact

More than 12.27 million trips and 46.4 million km logged since launch, as of EMEL's September 2024 tally (159 stations, 1,800 bikes at that point).

🎓 Lesson

Real-time availability data means little when the fleet itself is unreliable: EMEL's own 2022 budget cut planned GIRA investment by about 75%, and by May 2025 independent reporting found barely a third of the claimed ~2,000-bike fleet actually on the street, prompting a full app rebuild for 2026.

🚲 Mobility Cycling Shared mobility Sensors & IoT Open data

Sources

↗ Público — GIRA launches in Parque das NaçõesSeptember 2017 launch, 10 stations/100 bikes

↗ EMEL — GIRA 7th anniversary statisticsOfficial September 2024 tally: trips, km, stations, fleet

↗ GIRA — How it worksGPS units, live availability, e-bike battery display

↗ EMEL open data — GIRA stations datasetOpen station dataset, CSV/JSON/DATEX II

↗ Observador — GIRA reaches all 24 Lisbon parishesMay 2025, full-city coverage, citywide (not AML) scope

Show 2 more sourcesShow fewer

↗ Lisboa Para Pessoas — GIRA bike shortage crisisMay 2025: ~750 of claimed ~2,000 bikes operational, station closures, vandalism

↗ RTP — student builds workaround for GIRA app problemsPersistent app reliability issues, EMEL confirms full app rebuild

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇵🇹 PGIL — Lisboa Inteligente · Lisbon GIRA's live station-occupancy feed is one of the roughly 40 systems Lisbon's PGIL dashboard pulls together. 🇳🇴 Oslo Bysykkel City-Bike Network · Oslo Both relaunched with GPS-tracked bikes and live app availability — Oslo's fleet has held up better than Lisbon's. 🇪🇪 Tartu Smart Bike Share: Bike Share Run as Public Transport · Tartu Two mostly electric municipal fleets run by the city's own mobility house rather than franchised to a platform.

Explore the wider context

🔑 Your Smart City Is Owned by Someone Else 📖 Geofencing 📖 Open data 📖 Urban data platform (UDP)

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “GIRA Bike-Share” — Lisbon, Portugal. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/lisbon-gira-bikeshare/ (last verified 2026-08-07). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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