[zbrox]

From personal experience the deal they make with the host city is usually a win-win (for the municipality and for the citizens). The experience is great, JCDecaux gets to use some billboard locations, and the citizens get a dirt cheap public bike scheme. Here in Sweden it costs something like 8 euros per year. Yes, per year.

Another interesting thing is that they have a pretty OK API https://developer.jcdecaux.com/#/opendata/vls?page=getstarte...

[icebraining]

Oh, no argument there, I quite enjoyed using Villo, and it's really dirt cheap (not 8, but still just 30€).

That said, and while it's probably built on top of that API, Brussels has an even better API: it lets you submit a geographical area (which you can design manually on their site) and get info on all stations inside it in a single request/response, and you don't even need registration: https://opendata.bruxelles.be/explore/dataset/stations-villo...