Taipei, a succesful pioneer of public rental bikes

TAIPEI- While cities around Europe and North America have launched over the last decade free rental bicycle schemes, Southeast Asia remains largely behind its Western or also Chinese counterparts for fostering bike rides in an attempt to reduce pollution. China has for long favoured public bicycle rides: According to a recent study of Dr. H.W.Chang and Dr. H.N.Hsieh, two associate Professors from Chung Hua University in Hsinchu, (Taiwan), some 47 cities in China offer already public bike systems, far ahead of Japan with four cities and Korea with only two. In Southeast Asia so far, only Bangkok started to pioneer a limited public bike system on trial…

Meanwhile, Taiwan has been one of the most progressive countries to embrace the public bike revolution. The two largest metropolis on the Island, Taipei and Kaoshiung offer public biking system since 2009 with rising success. Taiwan Sports Council established a Bikeway System in Taiwan. The US$ 100 million investment invested between 2009 and 2011 helped creating 3,600 km of bike lanes within Taiwan.

Most important for local and tourists is Taipei City’s YouBike rental service. The City’s bicycle rental service is now available at 64 sites across Taipei, comprising a fleet of 2,196 YouBikes. The renting service "YouBike" is to be subscribed with a payment system including monthly use. Once accepted, subscribers can ride as much as they want but each ride should not exceed 30 minutes. The reason of this 30 minute threshold is to incite users not to keep the bicycle with them when they don't need it, in order to have some bicycle always available for other users. Similar systems have been adopted in Europe.

The YouBike scheme continues to grow in important: two new YouBike rental stations begun operations on April 15, next to the National Central Library and the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUSC). Only trouble for the tourist keen to use Taipei’s cleanest public transport system: most of the information and the website are exclusively in Chinese language…

Sourced: TravelDailyNews