Bikesharing: Past, Present, Future
Bikeshare has been booming in cities across the globe in the past few years. Although bikeshare has been around for decades, it is only now that we are witnessing its explosive growth.
I believe the reason for such rapid growth is the growing demand for easy transport alternatives and emergence of technologies that can now help better implement a bikeshare system.
The recent change in push and pull factors that has led to rapid urbanization is a very important topic that deserves a separate blog post by itself. In short, increasing energy price and road congestion due to limited road capacities that connect suburbia to the cities, as well as alluring social life in cities are among the most important factoring pulling younger populations to cities.
Earliest bikeshare system (first generation) was conceived by Luud Schimmelpennink, a member of the counterculture group called “Provo”.
The system was deployed in Amsterdam in 1965 with no security mechanism in place and “white bikes” were spread out throughout the city for everyone to use. Due to lack of accountability, bicycles got misplaced, stolen, damaged and eventually the program failed. Google Campus bikeshare still uses this model and primary handles theft by branding/painting the bicycles.
Provo movement members lifting up a white bicycle
An improved bikeshare system was born after in Copenhagen in 1995 called Copenhagen City Bikes or Bycykler København. The system used coin-operated checkout stations to address theft and vandalism problems with first-generation bikesharing. Because of the small amount of deposit, user anonymity, and lack of accountability, this initiative also failed soon after its launch.
Second generation bikeshare coin-base system
Evolution of credit card payment systems, software and IT integrations, lowering cost of hardware and manufacturing led to implementation and adoption of automated third generation bikeshare system. BIXI, B-Cycle, Cyclocity are among the pioneers of modern third generation station-based bikeshare systems.
However, because of the high cost of manufacturing and installing stations, third generation bikeshare reach has been limited to populated metropolitan areas. To further lower implementation cost, fifth generation bikeshare wave started by SOBI and ViaCycle, shifted the infrastructure such as locking mechanism, user interface, GPS tracking directly onto the bike, eliminating the need for expensive docking stations.
BitLock promise is to initiate the sixth generation of bikeshare by further reducing the implementation cost through smartphone integration and cloud payment processing. A bikeshare system implemented using BitLock would cost an order of magnitude less than third generation station-based systems.
By lowering the cost, places such as smaller towns, school campuses, and corporate campuses can now benefit from a bikeshare system to complete shuttle transportation system. Residential apartments can now offer bikeshare as amenity to their residents.