Have you heard of the bicycle-share programs that lots of European cities are now touting (to great success, I might add)? They work like this: bicycles stations are set up around the city, with bicycles that you access with a magnetic card. You ride the bike where you need to go (although you can’t keep it for more than two hours) and drop it off at another bike station. That’s it. Hard to think of an easier way to make thousands of bikes available to thousands of people.

Bike shares are one of the most successful PSSs, or product-service systems, which offer access rather than ownership. The American Zipcar program operates on the same principle, and is essentially the same thing as a bike share–just with cars. Barcelona’s bike share program, Bicing, got off to an amazing start last May, with 30,000 people signing up online in the first two months.

Paris has an equally successful program, called Velib: a combination of velo, or bicycle, and liberte (this blog won’t give me accents, but you get the idea). According to eyewitnesses on this Treehugger post, one can be hard pressed to even find a bicycle to use on evenings and weekends. The Parisian program was supposed to have doubled its 10,000 very cool-looking bicycles by the end of last year, according to the New York Times; whether or not that’s happened yet, I don’t know for sure. And the only problem such a volume might cause is the overrunning of taxi lanes by cyclists! If only Los Angeles had that problem.

Another great thing about the Velibs: while the Metro stops running at 1 a.m., the Velib stations are open all night long. No more 3 a.m., 15-block walks for Parisians.

Luckily, American cities are starting to catch on, and it looks like we might have some strong bicycle shares to boast of in the next few years. The University of Washington is creating an electric bike share for its Seattle campus, while San Francisco and Washington D.C. are currently developing programs of their own.

In San Francisco, they’re shooting for a free or nominal-fee system; while free is always nice, I don’t see any problem with asking people to pay a little bit to help maintain an excellent service. Year-long passes in Paris cost around $41, with the first half hour of your ride free. Small rental fees apply after that.

Just think what bike sharing means for a city: less traffic, less pollution, more active citizens, and the chance to see your usual surroundings at a slower, smoother pace. I can only hope that the growing popularity of bike shares is a signpost for the direction our cities are choosing to take in the 21st century.

Filed under: I'On Group, Urban Sustainability on February 4th, 2008