From New York City to London and beyond, bike-sharing has become big news in recent years. Big corporate sponsors have joined with big-city mayors to roll out ambitious programs that aim to make it easy for people to pick up a bike and to leave behind their dependence on cars. Yet large-scale programs of this kind have started to experience growing pains, and some bike-share observers are weighing the potential benefits of more modest efforts.
Say, for example, that you are visiting Brno, the secondlargest city in the Czech Republic. Brno lacks a big, organized bike-sharing program, but if you want to take a two-wheeled tour of the city’s rich architectural heritage, you can pop into one of a handful of cafés and borrow a refurbished bicycle, complete with a lock. A barista will take a small deposit from you, and you’re on your way.
Five establishments in the Old Town area of Brno have joined this local bike-sharing initiative, according to Anna Demchuk, who works at a café called Tˇri Ocásci. It’s a looseknit, volunteer-run operation that deploys a fleet of 15 bikes. (The organizer of the effort, an urban cycling enthusiast named Pavel Bad’ura, told an interviewer on Radio Praha that he started the bike-share network because he wanted “to shake things up a bit.”)
“It’s a super cool thing for a café or business owner to do,” says Colin Hughes, who directs national policy and evaluation for the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. (Before becoming a transportation wonk, Hughes was a bike guide in the Czech Republic, and he recalls riding through Brno.) Hughes notes that locally organized bike libraries are hardly new. Still, efforts like those undertaken by the baristas in Brno offer an intriguing alternative to more expansive programs.
In London, several problems have vexed the city’s widely promoted Barclays Cycle Hire program. Users have complained about an inadequate number of docking stations, for instance. Road safety issues—including six cycling fatalities in 2013—have also tarnished the program. (Hughes attributes those issues to the city’s “poor bike infrastructure.”) What’s more, ridership has declined since the start of the program, according to the London Evening Standard. In December 2013, Barclays announced that it would not renew its sponsorship of the Cycle Hire effort when its contract ends in 2015.
Small, relatively ad hoc bikesharing efforts can’t replace programs such as Cycle Hire, of course. But they might be ideal for filling gaps in biking infrastructure. Paul DeMaio, who helped launch what is now Capital Bikeshare in Washington, D.C., says that cities without the financial resources to launch more sophisticated programs—complete with docking stations, electronic payment, and GPS trackers—can take inspiration from Brno’s fleet of café-based bicycles. “Lower-cost [cycling] equipment is common in Eastern Europe. If this equipment can assist more bike-sharing services to start up around the world, then it’s the right equipment to be using,” he says.
“We definitely see potential in small-scale, low-cost bike sharing, especially for underserved communities,” says Melinda Musser, marketing manager at the Community Cycling Center, a nonprofit based in Portland, Ore. Her organization recently partnered with the Open Bicycle Initiative to pilot a system that combines open-source software with an inexpensive device that tracks and secures shared bikes. One benefit of this approach is that it eliminates the need for costly docking stations like those used by most large-scale urban bikesharing programs.
“Small bike-sharing is better than no bike-sharing,” says Alison Cohen, director of bike-sharing services for Toole Design and former president of Alta Bicycle Share. Even so, Cohen doesn’t think that the micro-model has much staying power. In her experience, informal bike-library projects consistently suffer from problems related to security (theft and vandalism), liability, and financial sustainability.
Over in Brno, the limitations and the benefits of the small-is-beautiful approach are equally evident. In late 2013, the bike-sharing project was shutting down for the winter season. “We’ll start up again in the spring,” says a barista who works at Café Trojka. “It’s been very successful.”
Read more stories by Suzie Boss.