Bike Sampa: a bike share the city permits rather than buys
São Paulo does not own or purchase its bike share. Tembici runs Bike Sampa on a revocable Termo de Permissão de Uso under Decree 57,889/2017, which lets the city charge a public price for the street space, obliges the operator to hand over trip records and requires expansion "to serve all regions" — while Itaú Unibanco pays for the branding and riders pay the fares. Because the Cidade Limpa law bans outdoor advertising, the sponsor is compensated in regulated visual space: in June 2022 the urban-landscape commission doubled the permitted logos in outer zones and allowed adverts on docking stations, explicitly to pay for e-bikes and peripheral stations. Two years later the specialist press found none of those e-bikes, a smaller fleet, stations pulled from four neighbourhoods and the operator absent from the commission's accountability meetings since February 2023.
About 1,600 bikes at 241 stations in May 2024, none of them electric, after 1,200 e-bikes had been announced for 2023 (Jornal Bicicleta, citing operator figures and city records)
🎓 Lesson
A permit costs a city almost nothing and buys it almost nothing. São Paulo's leverage runs through advertising rights, so the sanction for an undelivered fleet is fewer logos rather than breach of contract — and although the 2017 decree gives the city a right to every trip record, the only public data is an unlicensed real-time availability feed, with no trip dataset of the kind Boston, Chicago or New York publish.
Evidence📰 Media
Scale🏙️ City-wide
FundingItaú Unibanco sponsorship plus user fares; no municipal purchase identified
Sources
↗ Decreto nº 57.889 de 21 de setembro de 2017 — Prefeitura de São PauloThe governing instrument. Art. 9 §3 grants a Termo de Permissão de Uso under Lei 14.652/2007 (a permission, not a concession); art. 5: "Poderá ser cobrado preço público semanal, mensal ou anual"; art. 6 obliges operators to supply trip origin/destination, duration and service ratings to the city; art. 2 III requires "expansão com o objetivo de manter uma operação equilibrada, de forma a atender a todas as regiões". No term length is stated in the decree.
↗ CPPU atualiza norma para comunicação visual de bicicletas compartilhadas — Prefeitura de São Paulo3 June 2022. Partner logos raised from two to four in the North/South/East/West zones and from one to two in the expanded centre; advertising on docking stations permitted for the first time; advertising on the bicycles themselves remains barred by the Cidade Limpa law. Justified as enabling service expansion to regions further from the centre and the inclusion of shared e-bikes.
↗ Tembici fracassa na oferta de bicicletas elétricas em São Paulo — Jornal Bicicleta25 May 2024, specialist press. Source of the impact figure, sentence-level: "aproximadamente 1.600 bikes em 241 estações", none electric. Also: the 1,200 e-bike target announced by Mayor Ricardo Nunes on 3 June 2022 (starting with 500); station removals at Shopping Morumbi, Chácara Santo Antônio, Santana and Barra Funda documented in March 2024; "prejuízo de R$ 89,21 milhões em 2023", third consecutive loss, R$457m accumulated; Tembici stopped reporting to the CPPU after February 2023.
↗ Compartilhamento de Bicicletas — Tô Legal, Prefeitura de São PauloThe permit service page. Confirms operators must be credentialled with an approved Plano de Implantação before the Comitê Municipal de Uso do Viário, and must pay a preço público through a DAMSP form. Contradicts any claim that the arrangement is simply free for both sides — the city may collect, not pay.
↗ GBFS auto-discovery feed for system bike_sampa (Tembici / PBSC-Lyft infrastructure)Fetched 26 July 2026: last_updated 2026-07-26T19:19:00Z — primary evidence the system is operating today. Eight feeds including station_information, station_status and pricing plans. No license_url or terms_url is published, and system_information returns the placeholder name "kitchen" with a Lyft mobility-data contact address; no historical trip dataset was found anywhere.
↗ Bicycle-sharing system socio-spatial inequalities in Brazil — Journal of Transport & Health 8 (2018) 262–270Peer-reviewed counterweight, covering Brazilian capitals including São Paulo: station coverage favours affluent, central neighbourhoods; catchment areas reach 6–18% of city populations; users are more highly educated than the general population; the authors argue contractual arrangements shape where systems go. Full text is paywalled — verified at abstract level via the publisher listing and the FAPESP bibliographic record, not read in full.
↗ No aniversário da Bike Itaú, banco renova parceria com Tembici por 10 anos — Exame22 September 2022: the Itaú Unibanco sponsorship of Tembici renewed for a further decade, ten cities across Brazil, Chile and Argentina, more than 71 million trips since the 2012 launch. No investment figure disclosed, and no statement about municipal cost — so the entry claims neither.
↗ Prefeitura de São Paulo inaugura novo sistema do Bike Sampa começando com 25 estaçõesCity announcement of the 30 January relaunch under Tembici after the 2017 decree — 25 stations at first, target 260 stations and 2,600 bikes. Useful as the baseline the 2024 fleet is measured against. The page itself carries no year in the fetched text; the 2018 dating rests on contemporaneous trade coverage of the same relaunch.
↗ Em 5 anos, Bike Sampa atingiu apenas um terço das prefeituras regionais da cidade — Agência MuralCoverage-equity reporting: the system reached only a third of the city's regional subprefectures, never crossed the Tietê or Pinheiros rivers, and its expansion was frozen from 2015 for want of regulation until the September 2017 instrument. The site returns HTTP 403 to automated fetching; content verified from search-result extracts only, so no figure from it is used in the snippet.
↗ Tembici expande programa Bike Pra Você com 600 novas e-bikes em São Paulo — Mobilidade Sampa4 August 2025, operator announcement relayed by a mobility news site: 600 additional e-bikes in São Paulo. Deliberately kept out of the snippet's fleet description because these belong to Bike Pra Você, the iFood-sponsored programme for delivery riders, not to the general Bike Sampa fleet — the two must not be merged.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Bike Sampa: a bike share the city permits rather than buys” — São Paulo, Brazil. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/sao-paulo-bike-sampa/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
