The ‘Biggest, Baddest’ Bike Share Program in the World

By Christopher Cheung / The Tyee

You might think that the world’s largest public bike share system would be in Europe. After all, that’s where bike-share first started in 1965 in Amsterdam.

Hangzhou is home to the world’s largest public bike share system. David Tubau

But the largest is actually in a city of 9-million in southeast China: Hangzhou. The city is known for being the southern terminus of the Grand Canal and its beautiful scenery, such as the landmark West Lake.

This video “The Biggest, Baddest Bike-Share in the World” by Streetfilms, an organization that makes short videos about transportation, shows off the Hangzhou program’s efficiency. As of 2013, there are 66,500 bikes and 2,700 stations and the city’s goal is to expand to 175,000 bikes by 2020.

Leaders realized that building more roads and even increasing public transit was not efficient enough to get citizens where they needed.

“None of them solved the last mile issue,” says a transportation consultant in the video “and that’s where bike sharing came in.”

This article was reposted with permission from our media associate AlterNet.