The growth of bike-sharing schemes around the world
How Swedish engineer Ragnar Eklöf helped to devise urban bike-sharing schemes
A
AIt was on a summer's day in Stockholm, in 1966, that the idea of a city-wide bike-sharing scheme first took shape. Behind it stood Frihjul, a collective of Swedish activists bent on transforming society. To their minds, the plan — which they called the Gula Cykeln, or Yellow Bicycle, scheme — answered two dangers they saw looming: air pollution and rampant consumerism. A handful of second-hand bikes were painted yellow and set out in the heart of the city. Leaflets went out too, warning of the harm cars caused and urging residents to take up the yellow bikes. Left unlocked at spots around Stockholm, the bikes were free for anyone who needed to get somewhere.
B
BOne of those closely involved in the first scheme was Ragnar Eklöf, a Swedish industrial engineer who still lives in Stockholm and gets around by bike. As he tells it, the scheme drew plenty of notice — above all as a way of broadcasting what Frihjul stood for — yet never really managed to establish itself. Frihjul's efforts met hostility from the police, who cleared the yellow bikes off the streets almost the moment they appeared. For Eklöf, though, and for bike-sharing more broadly, this was merely the start. 'That first Yellow Bicycle plan was purely symbolic,' he says. 'We painted a handful of bikes yellow, and that was that. Things grew more serious only when I joined the Stockholm city council, two years on.'
C
CNow on the council, Eklöf seized his chance to put a far more detailed Yellow Bicycle plan before its members. 'My proposal was for Stockholm to spread 8,000 yellow bikes across the streets, free for anybody to ride,' he explains. 'I worked the figures out carefully, and it emerged that, per person and per kilometre, a yellow bicycle would cost the city only a tenth of what it was already paying to subsidise public transport.' The council, even so, threw the plan out without a single vote in its favour. 'Their view was that the bicycle belonged to a bygone age, and the car to the future,' Eklöf recalls. Yet none of this dampened his resolve.
D
DEklöf's faith in bike-sharing never wavered, and midway through the 1990s two Finns approached him for help in getting a scheme going in Helsinki. What came of it was the first large-scale bike-share programme anywhere in the world. The system ran on a deposit: a coin slotted into the bike was handed back once the bike was returned. Having built the Finnish system, Eklöf resolved to have another go on home ground — and on this occasion he managed to catch the attention of Sweden's Ministry of Transport. 'The times were different by then,' he remembers. 'Environmental awareness had grown, and Helsinki had shown that bike-sharing could actually work.' So it was that a fresh Yellow Bicycle plan opened in Stockholm in 1998. Riding the bikes, however, no longer came free: each trip now cost one krona, paid for using a chip card that the Swedish bank Nordgiro had developed. The bikes Eklöf drew up for it were bright and solidly built, held in purpose-made racks that the chip card unlocked; at the outset there were 250 of them, shared across five stations.
E
EWorking at Eklöf's side on the project was its system designer, Kjell Norberg. 'While we were still trying out the racks, he came out with the news that he'd already drawn up a better design. Naturally, we had to make do with the racks we already had.' Theft and vandalism, though, dogged the system. 'Come Monday, there were nearly always one or two bikes gone,' says Norberg. 'What became of them I couldn't say — after all, a yellow bike was recognisable in an instant.' The heaviest blow, however, fell when Nordgiro chose to scrap the chip card, having found it unprofitable. 'The whole system hinged on that chip card,' Norberg says. 'Carrying on would have meant building an alternative from scratch, and by then our commercial partner had lost all enthusiasm.'
F
FEklöf took the setback hard — true to form — but not for long. In 2002 a telephone call reached him from Vialux, a French outdoor-advertising firm keen to roll out his model in Zurich. 'It went splendidly. Zurich led to a system in Milan, and then, in 2008, came Rome — a turning point in the whole history of bike-sharing.' Rome's programme proved a runaway success nobody had foreseen, and today, with upwards of 20,000 bicycles in service, it prompted cities the world over to launch schemes of their own, every one patterned after Eklöf's. 'That it all came about is marvellous,' he says. 'The trouble is, I saw hardly any money myself, having never taken out a patent.'
G
GThese days bikes account for 41% of every journey made in Stockholm, and the city ranks — alongside Helsinki — as one of the two most cycle-friendly capitals in northern Europe; yet a second Yellow Bicycle plan never materialised. To Norberg's mind, the reason may simply be that everyone in Stockholm owns a bike already. Eklöf, for his part, cannot see why that should lessen the city's need for such a scheme. 'Somebody riding the metro doesn't carry a bicycle around, yet often needs some further means of transport to reach where they're finally headed.' Odd though he finds it that such a city lacks a thriving scheme, he stays hopeful. 'Back in the sixties we had no hope: people would have given their lives to keep cars in the city. That outlook has since turned completely around. Nowadays everyone yearns for cities no longer ruled by the car.'
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Question 1 - 5
Choose the correct paragraph, A-G.
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
1.
an account of the first proper version of the scheme being established in another country
2.
an admission that the scheme gained attention but made little headway at the outset
3.
figures showing how economical the scheme would be for the city
4.
an account of the scheme being plagued by stolen and vandalised bikes
5.
a comment on the scheme being copied by cities elsewhere in the world