As an exchange student, i have been living in Vancouver for 7 months, i truly feel how Vancouver is an environmental-firendly city such as the commitment in environmental protection, recycling and carbon offset program. However, i also would like to introduce an impressive story Taiwanese people have done for making the whole city more environmental-freindly, namely bike share system.
In this past 5 years, Taipei city government cooperates with Giant, which is one of the biggest bike manufacturing companies in the world, to launch bike share system in Taipei. We called it Youbike. It presently consists of 5,000 bicycles and 196 docking stations, scattered across across whole Taipei city. Peak usage could be 60,000 hires per day, meaning each bike is ridden on average 12 times. Total usage is over 12 million hires or approximately 33,000 hires per day in a year.
I have ridden Youbike several times before. It is really user-friendly and easily to ride. In addition, i think one of the reasons why the usage of Youbike is so high because docking stations are all really close to subway stations, landmarks, public parks and schools. So for users, they can ride Youbike either to take subway, or to office, even to enjoy the sunshine in parks. The video below is the introduction of using Youbike.
As we know, riding bike instead of taking other transportations could efficiently decrease the greenhouses gases emission. And most importantly, it is a lucrative business model. The average revenue of Youbike is 120 million New Taiwanese Dollars. (equivalent to 4 million CAD) Beside Taipei, Vélib’ in Paris, Citbike in NYC, the are all bike share system and all show progressive results. For next few years, Giant is thinking to expand Youbike to other cities in Taiwan such as Taichung, or even international expansion. Therefore, if Giant is considering to expand internationally, probably Shanghai, Singapore could be good candidates for them.
References:
http://www.youbike.com.tw
Hi Paul,
I’m not aware that you’re on exchange here at UBC – that’s really neat! I hope you’ve been enjoying your time here in Vancouver and have had the chance to see some of the great things the city has to offer.
I think it’s great that these metropolitan, bustling, and active cities such as Taipei are implementing bike-sharing systems. I know with Asian countries, especially those that are developing rapidly, they’re notoriously known for the volume of motor vehicles on the roads. With all these emissions and gases being released into the atmosphere, I can only imagine how contaminated the air can be year after year. I actually go back to Shanghai once a year and I do recall seeing bike-sharing services on the streets, but please correct me if I’m wrong. If these types of cities haven’t rolled out bike-sharing, I’d be slightly concerned.
I remember the city of Vancouver making a pledge to roll out their own bike-sharing system sometime in 2015. Unfortunately, I don’t think any significant progress has been made over the years. There seems to be financial concerns, which seem quite likely. Even though Vancouver has a green and environmental culture, our population might not be able to sustain this kind of implementation. If you’re curious about the proposal, you can visit the city’s page: http://vancouver.ca/streets-transportation/public-bike-share-system.aspx
I find it kind of funny that we haven’t introduced bike-sharing, especially since so many new car-sharing companies have been released over the few years. But all in all, it is a great idea. Hopefully the service also encourages other people to pick up cycling as a method of transportation.
Thanks again for sharing!
Hi Paul,
I actually got to try using this during a trip to the city of Hangzhou when I was on exchange in Shanghai. It is an amazing bike sharing system! Hangzhou was mostly a tourist city, so the bikes and docking stations were located in many of the main tourist spots, so it was super convenient. There were not a lot of cars in the city, mostly bikes and scooters.
I think it is a great idea to implement this in Vancouver, as our city now has so many designated bike lanes already in place. Like what Jeffrey said in his comment, they are still in “the works” to push this through. I think one of the big hurdles is that Vancouver requires bikers to wear a helmet. If there will be bike sharing, how can people use/ get their helmets? The logistics in the system needs to be adjusted.
Nonetheless, bike sharing is a great innovation and one that i believe Vancouver needs! It just makes sense.
Szascha