While Portland's Yellow Bike Project was successful in terms of publicity, it proved unsustainable due to theft and vandalism of the bicycles. It took the approach of simply releasing a number of bicycles to the streets for unrestricted use. One of the first community bicycle projects in the United States was started in Portland, Oregon in 1994 by civic and environmental activists Tom O'Keefe, Joe Keating and Steve Gunther. The Bikeabout program was discontinued by the university in 1998 in favor of expanded minibus service the total costs of the Bikeabout program were never disclosed. Seasonal weather restrictions and concerns over unjustified charges for bike damage also imposed barriers to usage. Implemented with an original budget of approximately £200,000, the Portsmouth Bikeabout scheme was never very successful in terms of rider usage, in part due to the limited number of bike kiosks and hours of operation. On arrival at the destination station, the smart card unlocked cycle rack and recorded the bike's return, registering if the bike was returned with damage or if the rental time exceeded a three-hour maximum. For a small fee, users were issued magnetic striped 'smart cards' readable at a covered 'bike store' kiosk, unlocking the bike from its storage rack, station-located CCTV cameras limited vandalism. Funded in part by the EU's ENTRANCE program, the Bikeabout scheme was a "smart card" fully automated system. The Bikeabout scheme was launched in October 1995 by the University of Portsmouth, UK as part of its Green Transport Plan in an effort to cut car travel by staff and students between campus sites. To prevent thefts, bike sharing programs gravitated to smart card control systems.' One of the first 'smart bike' programs was the Grippa™ bike storage rack system used in Portsmouth (UK)'s Bikeabout system. In the utopian novel of a society that does not use fossil fuels, Callenbach described a bicycle sharing system which is available to inhabitants and is an integrated part of the public transportation system. Įrnest Callenbach's novel Ecotopia (1975) illustrated the idea. Years later, Schimmelpennink admitted that "the Sixties experiment never existed in the way people believe" and that "no more than about ten bikes" had been put out on the street "as a suggestion of the bigger idea." As the police had temporarily confiscated all of the White Bicycles within a day of their release to the public, the White Bicycle experiment had actually lasted less than one month. It originally existed as one in a series of White Plans proposed in the street magazine produced by the anarchist group PROVO. The program is still active in some parts of the Netherlands, e.g., at Hoge Veluwe National Park where bikes may be used within the park. Within a month, most of the bikes had been stolen and the rest were found in nearby canals. This so-called White Bicycle Plan ( Dutch: Wittefietsenplan) provided free bicycles that were supposed to be used for one trip and then left for someone else. the group Provo painted fifty bicycles white and placed them unlocked in Amsterdam for everyone to use freely. The earliest well-known community bicycle program was started in the summer of 1965 by Luud Schimmelpennink in association with the group Provo in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. White bicycle as an emblem of the Wittefietsenplan movement The first bike sharing projects were initiated by various sources, such as local community organizations, charitable projects intended for the disadvantaged, as way to promote bicycles as a non-polluting form of transportation – and bike-lease businesses. History įor a more comprehensive list, see List of bicycle-sharing systems. With its antecedents in grassroots mid-1960s efforts by 2022, approximately 3,000 cities worldwide offer bike-sharing systems, e.g., Dubai, New York, Paris, Montreal and Barcelona. In July 2020, Google Maps began including bike share systems in its route recommendations. In either format, systems may incorporate smartphone web mapping to locate available bikes and docks. The programmes themselves include both docking and dockless systems, where docking systems allow users to rent a bike from a dock, i.e., a technology-enabled bicycle rack and return at another node or dock within the system – and dockless systems, which offer a node-free system relying on smart technology. For the sharing of an individual bicycle, see Sociable, Tandem bicycle, and Quadracycle.Ī bicycle-sharing system, bike share program, public bicycle scheme, or public bike share ( PBS) scheme, is a shared transport service where bicycles are available for shared use by individuals at low cost. For access to an individual bicycle, see Bicycle rental. This article is about access to a bicycle fleet service.
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