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Bike Sharing: Inside The Global Boom That Took 50 Years

This article is more than 8 years old.

Visit any major city in the world, and it's likely to have a bike sharing program, or be discussing one. There are now an estimated 1 million bike sharing bikes in use worldwide.

But, while bike sharing has boomed in recent years, it took a long time to take off.

City Lab has an entertaining interactive feature that explains the slow roll out of bike sharing programs worldwide, and explores why they've recently accelerated.

The first bike sharing program dates back 50 years, to an attempt by a group of activists in Amsterdam, to make bikes available for everyone.

In 1965, they placed a group of white bikes, called witte fietsen, around what has become the world's most bike crazy city. The bikes were free to use and unlocked.

And, as you might guess, they disappeared. So did the program, which was shut down.

It took until 1996 for enthusiasts to give bike sharing  another go. That happened at Portsmouth University, in the United Kingdom, where a small program called Bikeabout was born.

City Lab says the program used a then-innovative feature to keep the bikes from being stolen. It was an individualized, magnetic stripe card, that allowed bikes to be tracked when not in use.

The French were next to embrace bike sharing. In the late 1990s and the middle of last decade, bike sharing programs were introduced in Rennes, Lyon and eventually Paris, where the 6,000 bike Velib program was rolled out in 2007.

Soon after, bike sharing came to North America. Systems rolled out in Montreal, Washington, Boston, Minneapolis and Denver.

But the move that brought bike sharing to Americans' attention came only two years ago. That's when Citi Bike opened in New York, Divvy launched in Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area got its program.

Together with a bike sharing boom in China, there were 700,000 bike sharing bikes in use in 2013.

The growth has continued unabated, with another 300,000 bikes coming on line in the past two years.

And more are on the way: Detroit is going to introduce a city wide bike sharing program in 2016, on top of the private system that billionaire Dan Gilbert launched for his employees and the one that General Motors offers.

Take some time to enjoy the City Lab bike sharing interactive. And if you're interested in knowing more about mobility issues, read my FORBES eBook Curbing Cars: America's Independence From The Auto Industry.

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