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City bike-share schemes were initially evaluated primarily on ridership numbers, a metric that made intuitive sense but obscured important variation in how the schemes were actually used. Later analyses distinguishing between commuting trips and recreational trips revealed that schemes concentrated in dense commercial districts tended to replace short car and taxi journeys, meaningfully reducing local traffic congestion, whereas schemes in leisure-oriented areas mostly displaced walking trips instead, producing negligible congestion benefits despite comparable overall ridership figures. This distinction has led transport planners to argue that station placement, not total trip volume, is the more reliable predictor of a bike-share scheme's actual impact on urban traffic.