Robert Horvitz View from Europe Subscribe to Newsletter Tell a Friend Print this Page 06/19/2008 In Troubled Times for Transportation, Bike-Loan Schemes Flourish with RFID The 15th of July will mark the first anniversary of Paris' wildly successful bike rental scheme Vélib'. It wasn't the first such scheme but it's almost certainly the largest, with 20,000-plus bikes available from more than 1,450 stations. Over 6 million rides were logged in the first 3 months, and 400 people are now employed repairing and redistributing the bikes. According to Time magazine, "the program has already yielded a 5% drop in car traffic." Some members of my generation might remember the Provos of Amsterdam as the unlikely originators of civic bike-sharing: "The brain-child of Industrial designer Luud Schimmelpenninck, the White Bike Plan proposed the banning of environmentally noxious cars from the inner city, to be replaced by bicycles. Of course, the bikes were to be provided free by the city. They would be painted white and permanently unlocked, to secure their public availability... "The Provos decided to put the plan into action by providing the first 50 bicycles [in July 1965]. But the police immediately confiscated them, claiming they created an invitation to theft. Provo retaliated by stealing a few police bikes..." ---Teun Voeten (1990) Luud Schimmelpenninck wrote to the Dutch newspaper het Parool last year calling for a revival of the White Bike Plan.  According to Dirk Kloosterboer, he suggested that "the system should be operated by advertising company JCDecaux" - which created the systems in Paris, Lyon, Marseilles, Toulouse, Brussels, Seville, Luxembourg, etc. Public-private partnerships to make bikes available for short trips within cities have taken Europe by storm, as this map shows: Not all the systems are the same, but one thing they have in common is the clever use of RFID. RFID-enabled cards unlock attendant-less bike racks, and the bikes themselves have RFID tags so the system knows when each leaves and returns to the racks. The tags also help to locate stolen or abandoned bikes. RFID-enabled public transport cards can be used to pay for borrowing the bikes, if necessary. One must add "if necessary" because in most of the systems there's no charge for a bike borrow that lasts less than 30 minutes. In Paris and elsewhere, the cost of an additional half-hour is 1 euro, 2 euros for the half hour after that, and 4 euros for subsequent half hours. This escalating rate-scale is designed to avoid competition with private bike rent services whose customers typically borrow bikes for longer than half a day. In many European cities, the same "smart" transport card can be used to ride on buses, trams and subways - and to borrow a bike. JCDecaux says that each of their borrowed bikes is ridden about three kilometers 5 to 15 times per day, and more than 80% of the journeys are brief enough to be free of charge. In Lyon - where their 4,000 bikes are used 20,000 - 30,000 times per day - they calculate that "more than 250 tonnes of CO2 is saved annually." And not only CO2 is saved. In Europe, 30% of all car trips reportedly cover distances of less than 2 km, and 50% involve distances of less than 5 km. When travel time is measured door-to-door, bicycles are generally the fastest mode of travel for distances of less than 5 km through car-choked cities (see chart at right, from Cycling: The Way Ahead for Towns and Cities by Dekoster & Schollaert, European Commission, 2000). JCDecaux designed, tested, paid for and deployed the entire bike lending system in the cities where they operate. In exchange, their contract with the city usually gives them the right to pocket the income from the bike rentals and to sell advertising in subway stations, on bus shelters, billboards, etc. Other cities - like Barcelona, Stockholm and Oslo - have contracted with JCDecaux's rival, Clear Channel Outdoor. The Economist says Barcelona pays Clear Channel to run the local "Bicing" program, but income from the rentals goes to the city. If you want to know more about these schemes, Paul DeMaio's Bike-Sharing Blog has links to the websites run by the schemes themselves, and to published research and articles about them. The European Commission's energy and transport directorate has dozens of case studies on their Cycling webpage. A nice 3.5-minute video newsclip produced by the Commission shows how cities from Bucharest to Bolzano to London encourage bike use. And finally, the European Cyclists Federation has an informative policy-oriented website. RFID can also be used to enhance the appeal of bicycles in other ways. Thousands of cyclists are injured or killed annually in crashes with motor vehicles, so a Danish company developed a system that alerts the drivers of cars and trucks about approaching cyclists. When the cyclist nears an intersection, the RFID tag on his or her bike triggers a warning light with a bicycle symbol on it which is positioned under the traffic signal. "Researchers have tested a similar system that combines RFID with GPS technology. It would send alerts directly to the GPS device inside a driver's car," notes EPCglobal. In "Paris Bike Rental Scheme Goes Global," BusinessWeek says Moscow, London, Sydney, Geneva, Hamburg and other cities are planning to launch Vélib'-like services. "And Beijing wants to trump Paris, though under its own steam: 50,000 rental bicycles have been announced for the Olympic Games in 2008." How long will it take the US to catch up? Less time than you might suppose. According to Time, "With gas prices skyrocketing and carbon-footprint consciousness going mainstream, more and more cities are betting that Americans are finally ready to make biking part of their daily commute. [Washington, DC,] Denver and Minneapolis will also kick off bike-sharing programs this summer, and Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, Ore., Seattle, and Arlington, Va., are in talks to launch their versions within the next year or so." Still, bike theft and parking are two problems that need to be resolved before bicycles are widely accepted as an urban transport alternative. RFID helps with both. CyberSolonJapan, for example, has developed an ingeniously simple system marketed under the name Perfect Gate. It consists of one tag embedded in the front wheel of a bike, and a second tag which associates the owner with that particular bike and grants access to the parking lot: "one can take a bike out of the parking [enclosure] only when encrypted code on his/her stick key matches the encrypted code stored in the bike's RFID tag." This system apparently reduced thefts to zero at the lot in Osaka where it was tested. Some bike manufacturers use RFID for inventory-tracking inside their factories and on shipping crates to facilitate product deliveries. But none yet build RFID into bike frames for after-purchase use by riders or parking- and traffic-management services as described here. For that to happen, there would have to be wider agreement on standards. However, the World Report for ITS Standards notes that while interest in RFID is "expanding rapidly," nothing specific to bicycles is yet on the Intelligent Transport System agenda at either the global or regional levels. back Related Items: • Molfetta, Italy • W2i Finalizes Program Agenda for Digital Cities Convention in Washington, DC • NYC Congestion Pricing Plan Is Dead, Assembly Speaker Says • Can Sweden Reach Consensus on Congestion Charging? • Government Processes Reengineering Roundtable: Summary • Riverside `08 Comments No records were found. Post new comment: Only registered users can add comments. Please Log-in

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