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A wet weekend costs London a third of its bike hires

I matched three years of daily Santander Cycles hires to London's rainfall to see who stops riding when it rains. Commuters mostly don't. Weekend riders do.

Data

TfL cycle hire, Open-Meteo, 2023–25

Tools

Python, pandas, matplotlib

Code

github.com/elenamarsh

Line chart: average daily Santander Cycles hires fall as rain increases, more steeply on weekends than on weekdays

The question

Does bad weather stop people cycling, or only some people? If commuters ride whatever the weather, the network needs bikes in the same places every weekday. If leisure riders stay home, weekend planning should follow the forecast.

The data

TfL publishes the number of Santander Cycles hires for every day. I took 1 January 2023 to 31 December 2025, 1,096 days, and joined each day to its total rainfall in central London from Open-Meteo's historical weather API.

Then I grouped the days by rain, from dry (0.2 mm or less) to 10 mm and over, and split weekdays from weekends.

What I found

On a dry weekday, Londoners hire about 27,200 bikes. On a weekday with 5 mm of rain or more, 20,900: a drop of 23%. Weekends start lower, at 22,100, and fall to 15,000 on wet days: a drop of 32%.

Average hires per day. Weekends are Saturdays and Sundays.
Rain that day	Weekday	Weekend	Days
Dry	27,217	22,071	556
0.2–1 mm	26,694	20,937	163
1–2 mm	24,777	17,778	86
2–5 mm	23,916	17,619	139
5–10 mm	21,762	15,040	95
10 mm and over	19,638	15,125	57

Limits

Rain isn't the only thing that changes. Wet days cluster in winter, when fewer people ride anyway, so part of the gap is the season, not the rain. Next I'd compare wet and dry days within the same month, and add temperature and daylight.

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