This suggests that there may be a greater latent demand for cycling in deprived areas, perhaps due to low levels of bicycle ownership resulting from lack of affordability or storage facilities. It is therefore possible that a disproportionate increase in uptake would be seen among deprived populations if BCH docking stations were situated in more deprived areas, as is planned with the expansion of the BCH scheme in spring 2012. Exploration of other potential barriers to usage among deprived populations, including the cost of annual access and the need to pay using a selleck screening library debit or credit card is also warranted. The

use of routinely collected registration data limited what could be studied. It was necessary to use area-level data as a proxy for individual socio-economic deprivation and ethnicity, and it is not known if the observed associations would hold true at the individual level. This is a particular limitation with respect to ethnicity data, which in addition was (like our commuter data) collected almost a decade before the period of this study. In addition, as access keys can be passed between individuals, it is likely that a small number of trips were made by individuals with different demographic this website profiles to those who registered. A further limitation is the lack of a clearly defined denominator population, as any individual with a UK debit or credit card could

register to use the scheme. Having data for only a seven month period meant it was not possible to study temporal trends, particularly as usage levels are likely to be highly affected

by the seasons. The health benefits of cycling are well known, and public bicycle sharing schemes are becoming a popular way of promoting cycling in urban environments. Our study has shown that London’s public bicycle sharing scheme is being well used, but that usage is not equitably distributed throughout the population. these Specifically, women and those living in deprived areas are less likely to register to use the scheme. Amongst those who did register, however, usage was actually higher among those living in deprived areas after adjusting for the fact that those areas were less likely to be close to a BCH docking station. This suggests that the scheme may be meeting a currently unmet need for access to bicycling in deprived communities. Policy makers should consider the health benefits that could be gained from expanding the scheme into deprived areas, and from investigating other means to increase uptake of the scheme among women and those on low incomes. FO conducted this independent research during an MSc funded by the UK National Health Service (NHS)’s postgraduate public health training programme. AG supervised the research during a post-doctoral research fellowship supported by the UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).