Reading passage
In the summer of 1965, a group of activists in Amsterdam placed fifty bicycles, all painted white, on the streets of the city and invited anyone to use them free of charge. The project, known as the White Bicycle Plan, is usually described as the world's first public bike-sharing scheme. Its organisers believed that the bicycle, rather than the car, should be the future of urban transport. Unfortunately, most of the bicycles were stolen or thrown into canals within a few weeks, and the scheme collapsed.
A more successful attempt appeared in Copenhagen in 1995. Riders could release a bicycle from special racks by inserting a coin, which was returned when the bicycle was brought back to any rack in the city. The bicycles were sturdy, painted in bright colours, and built so that ordinary parts could not be removed and sold. This coin deposit system kept the bicycles in circulation for much longer, and the idea spread to other European cities. However, because the bicycles carried no way of identifying the user, theft remained a serious problem.
The third generation of bike sharing arrived with electronic technology. In 2005 the French city of Lyon launched a scheme in which registered users unlocked bicycles with smart cards, so every journey could be recorded. Two years later, Paris introduced Velib, with more than 20,000 bicycles and hundreds of docking stations across the city. Velib quickly became one of the largest schemes in the world and inspired imitators from London to Melbourne.
A further revolution came from China around 2015, when companies introduced dockless bicycles. Instead of returning the bicycle to a fixed station, users simply parked it anywhere within a defined area and ended the journey with a smartphone app. A global positioning system chip inside each bicycle allowed the company to track its location. Because no expensive docking stations were needed, the schemes expanded at astonishing speed.
At their peak, the two largest Chinese companies operated more than 20 million bicycles between them, and users made tens of millions of journeys every day. The arrival of dockless bikes sharply increased cycling in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, where bicycles had been disappearing as car ownership rose. Western cities soon adopted the model as well, although usually with stricter rules about where the bicycles could be parked.
Dockless sharing, however, created new problems. Companies flooded cities with millions of bicycles to compete for customers, and pavements became blocked by broken or badly parked machines. Local governments in many cities had to confiscate thousands of abandoned bicycles, and some firms went bankrupt, leaving users unable to recover their deposits. Cities responded by limiting the number of operators and requiring permits.
Despite these difficulties, bike sharing brings clear benefits. It solves what transport planners call the last mile problem, the awkward gap between a railway station and a traveller's final destination. Regular cycling improves public health, and every shared bicycle trip replaces a journey that might otherwise have been made by car. A shared bicycle is used several times a day, whereas a privately owned one spends most of its life locked away, so sharing makes far better use of limited street space. Studies in several cities have found that bike sharing reduces both congestion and air pollution.
Recent schemes increasingly include electric bikes, which help riders climb hills and cover longer distances without arriving exhausted. Many cities are also integrating bike sharing with public transport, so that one smart card or app pays for the train, the bus and the bicycle. This integration encourages people to combine different forms of transport in a single journey.
Today there are more than a thousand bike-sharing schemes worldwide, and the idea continues to evolve. Supporters argue that shared bicycles are one of the cheapest and fastest ways to make cities cleaner and healthier. Critics point out that schemes require careful management and public money. What seems certain is that the simple bicycle, invented almost two centuries ago, still has an important role in the modern city.