Guest con­trib­utor Amber Par­kin, who intro­duced us to Hangzhou’s bike shar­ing scheme, gives us the pros and cons of her home town’s own bike cul­ture and shar­ing program.

Auckland’s bike shar­ing scheme | Photo by Amber Parkin

Auck­land has not tra­di­tion­ally been seen as a great city in which to bike ride due to its hilly nature. How­ever in the last couple of years, a lot more bicycles have been spot­ted on the streets! This is thanks in part to a couple of ele­ments: influ­enced by fash­ion, a strong ‘fixie’/fixed gear scene is emer­ging; an act­ive cyc­ling lobby group – CAA, who have been work­ing tire­lessly to work with the coun­cils to make the city friend­lier for those using pedal power; and finally, Auck­landers and vis­it­ors alike have been empowered to get mov­ing with a bike shar­ing system.

Run by Next­bike, the rental model is sim­ilar to schemes found across Ger­many and Aus­tria. There are around 170 bikes avail­able in Auck­land City.

Auckland’s bike shar­ing scheme | Photo by Amber Parkin

How it works:

Riders register for the sys­tem using a phone num­ber (cell phones from any­where in the world work) and a credit card. When you’re ready to ride, call the given num­ber and Next­bike will provide you with a code to unlock the bicycle. When riders have fin­ished their out­ing (either at their start­ing loc­a­tion or some­where else), they simply call again to fin­ish the session.

Pos­it­ives:

• They are every­where! Once you’re on the lookout for them, you notice them every­where. The nearest bike ‘park-up’ is less than 100m from my house.
• “Registered Riders” – fre­quent users of the sys­tem are rewar­ded with one free 30 minute ride per 24 hour period.
• Unlike other cit­ies there is no major deposit neces­sary – pay as you go.
• The bikes are pretty easy to ride, and have a bas­ket – per­fect for pla­cing your shop­ping or a back­pack in.

Neg­at­ives:

• It can be a little con­fus­ing to ini­tially grasp the mem­ber­ship sys­tem, and takes a couple of minutes to set up if you’re stand­ing on the side of the street. How­ever this is eas­ily over­come by regis­ter­ing online first.
• Auck­land still needs friend­lier roads for cyclists!

It’s won­der­ful to see a trans­port option that has been so suc­cess­ful (and heav­ily util­ized by me) in Europe and Asia becom­ing more read­ily avail­able in my local com­munity. Hope­fully, given time, more loc­als will be jump­ing on a bike to the local super­mar­ket, or simply as a recre­ation option dur­ing the weekend.

How is your city try­ing to build a more sus­tain­able trans­port sys­tem? Is your city cycle-friendly? Share your thoughts below and help us doc­u­ment the best of our region.