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Concept
Bicycle-sharing system
Summary
A 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.
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. In either format, systems may incorporate smartphone web mapping to locate available bikes and docks. In July 2020, Google Maps began including bike share systems in its route recommendations.
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.
List of bicycle-sharing systems
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.
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. the group Provo painted fifty bicycles white and placed them unlocked in Amsterdam for everyone to use freely.
This so-called White Bicycle Plan (Wittefietsenplan) provided free bicycles that were supposed to be used for one trip and then left for someone else. Within a month, most of the bikes had been stolen and the rest were found in nearby canals. 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. It originally existed as one in a series of White Plans proposed in the street magazine produced by the anarchist group PROVO.
Official source
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