What 1s a "City Bike"?<

What is a
City Bike?

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And what it is not!

Let us start to answer this timely question with a negative answer. This is what a city bike is not . . . This is important.

It is not "just one more nice bike project". And it is extremely important that your planning team grasp this point thoroughly from the very beginning of your project. It makes a huge, critical even difference.

Your city bike project is, above all . . .

A significant public transport project;
A roads and infrastructure project of some considerable dimensions;
A public health project whole impacts you are going to stretch hard to fully comprehend;
A city center economic development project that can win back the center; and yes!
A climate project that can set you apart from all the rest.

(And a terrific visiting card that will for sure bring people to your city.)

This is the scale and the range of your challenge. No less! So it is critical that the basic mandate and the level resources you are prepared to put into it respond to this reality. From the beginning, and again . . . it's not just one more nice bike project.

Finally, as you will see once you have your project up and running, it is in fact and above all an important step in a process of transforming your city. It's a great place to start because you can do it quite quickly, at low levels of cost (relative to most of those high-cost, low-impact old mobility investments), with a strong public consensus behind the project, and with high and visible impacts. That's important. But as you will see, once you have this well in hand, it is going to lead you on another path of mobility policy for your city, and that in good part is what it offers to the city.

Ancient history

The idea of a shared "pick up and leave it" bicycle is not a new one. For many years it was the best and fastest way to get around Cambridge, Oxford and other older university towns. But the granddaddy of city bikes as we know them today was the original (in all sense of the word) White Bicycle project as implemented in Amsterdam by the provocative Dutch innovator Luud Schimmelpennink and his collaborators back in 1968. And even if most of these free white bicycles ended up stolen or rotting in a canal after a couple of months, the Amsterdam project definite opened the way to all you will find here.

Also known variously as White, Yellow or Community Bicycles, Free Bikes, Public Bicycles, PBS (Public Bicycle Systems), Smart Bikes, Public-Use Bicycles (PUBs), and by many other names depending on place and project, shared cycles have been the subject of several hundreds of projects and variants. But only within the last few years have they begun to show the way toward projects and systems which can really function as an important part of a city's daily transportation arrangements.

We keep calling them City Bikes, because it's the impact at the level of the city which are our main concern here.

And in 2008?

A "City Bike", as we understand it in 2008, is city-wide public bicycle system, mainly intended to serve people living and working in a city for the day to day transport means. You can spot them for sure since they share the following characteristics:

They offer fully automated service
Are available 24/7.
Open to all registered users/clients.
On-street systems (i.e., not garaged or locked up)
Pick up/drop off at multiple convenient locations within service area
Free or almost free for very short periods (i.e., half hour or enough for a fast hop).

While mainly intended to serve local residents for high quality transit in their daily lives, they are also showing themselves to be a great way to attract tourists to your city and give them easy access in ways that open up the city as never before.

You may wish to keep in mind that city bikes as we define them are not "rental bikes". Of course you will find shared bikes available in various permutations to different kinds of groups and sponsors, in national parks, for company employees, etc. But these are closed systems for specific groups and basically available only in off-street locations . A true city bike is available to anybody on the street who steps forward and does what is needed to start to use them. It is a form of public transportation.

A City Bike very quickly becomes your preferred automatic choice for getting around in your own city. It is, in fact, a true form of "automobility".

What they offer you and your city

There are a growing number of these projects around, mainly in European cities (but with the move gaining real speed in North America) that are, incidentally, in almost all cases among the leading innovating cities in our sector. All these City Bike projects have in common that they aim to:

Add a new dimension to urban mobility
Extend and complete the range of public transport services
Integrate the options into a seamless multimodal package
Available on-demand
For city-length journeys.

The main rationale behind these systems (for they are very much systems) is that they:

Provide cost-effective on-demand transportation
Reach out to destinations un- or under-served by other modes of transit
Require far less infrastructure than other modes of transportation
Are inexpensive to produce and maintain
Do not add to traffic congestion
Do not create pollution in their operation
Improve cycling safety by sharply increasing number of cyclists on the street
And in the process bringing many more "own" cycles out onto the streets of the city
Cut back on theft of personal bicycles
Provide users with the added benefit of healthy exercise.

One of the common rationales cited by successful city bike programs is that they provide an effective substitute for at least some of the large number of short distance trips made by cars in urban areas, often with only one person in the car. Such trips make poor use of scarce public resources, and of course carry with them a heavy environmental burden.

Some good city bike projects to inch you up your learning curve

Here are a couple of handfuls of telling examples of cities with shared bike services currently in operation. This listing is far from complete (check out 1000 cities or Paul DeMaio's World City Bike map for more) -- but for those who have not yet had a chance to dig into our topic it provides a good place to get a feel for the terrain. We have placed them here in the order in which they were/are being implemented to give the reader a feel for the broad dynamics of the on-going World City Bike revolution.

(Note: If you click on the menu just to your left to Learning Curve/Some Leading City Bike projects , you may well find yet more projects and links listed -- since that menu is updated more often than this web page.)

The following sites report on cities served by the indicated suppliers:

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