Rentabike Moves Up A Gear From Curiosity To Runaway Success  

The Guardian has a report on a bicycle sharing scheme in oepration in Lyon that has become a resounding success. Luckily for the Europeans, train and bicycle based transport is a realistic option to meet a lot of travel requirements there due to their existing infrastructure and city designs. If only the US and Australia could say the same thing.

The French are not short of groundbreaking cheap and efficient public transport. But now the Paris Metro and the high-speed TGV have a more humble, although no less hi-tech, equal - the Lyon rentabike.

Less than three months after its launch, the city's Vélo'v scheme, reportedly the largest of its kind in the world, is a runaway success. "Very quickly, we've moved from being a curiosity to a genuine new urban transport mode," said Gilles Vesco of the city council.

Some 15,000 Lyonnais are now registered users, and the 24-hour scheme's 1,500 sturdy silver-and-red bikes - which have three gears, a handlebar basket and a lock - are detached from their 100-odd computerised racks on average 6.5 times each a day. And this is just the beginning: by 2007, there should be 4,000 cycles and up to 400 racks in the city - which is one roughly every 300 metres.

Collective bike schemes started in the 1960s with the free "white bikes" of Amsterdam and Copenhagen, schemes which laboured under the hippy-era illusion that most users would be public-spirited enough to return bikes after use. They were not.

The Lyon scheme adopts a system pioneered, on a much smaller scale, in Vienna and incorporates strong incentives not to abscond. Users must register in advance so that their personal details are on record, and they are then issued with a security code and a prepaid card, which they can top up at each rack's computer terminal.