In this guest post, Amber Par­kin from Code For Some­thing shares her impres­sions of a clever bike shar­ing scheme in Hang­zhou, China.

Hang­zhou | Photo by Amber Par­kin www.codeforsomething.com

While in Shang­hai I’m stay­ing with my lovely friend Julian, in his tra­di­tional alley pad. A few days ago he had to travel to a “small South­ern town” for work, so I tagged along. Turns out the small town, Hang­zhou, is home to 1.8 mil­lion people (almost half the pop­u­la­tion of New Zea­l­and) and is a major hub of domestic tourism.

It’s a really nice place – built around a lake with many gar­dens and pretty pago­das. How­ever, the thing that impressed me most was was the city’s bike-sharing system.

This is how it works: You buy a card at a kiosk, mak­ing a refund­able deposit of 300RMB. Using your swipe card, you can then unlock any bike at any sta­tion around the city. From there you’re free to ride any­where in the city, which hand­ily has wide bike lanes on both sides of the road (we went right around the lake and through town and back again). When you’re done, drop the bicycle off and pay per hour of use – which works out to mere cents. Brilliant!

Hang­zhou | Photo by Amber Par­kin www.codeforsomething.com

Accord­ing to ‘The Bike Shar­ing Blog’:

• There are 10,000 bikes, loc­ated at 350 stations.
• There are sta­tions roughly every 200 metres, where you can pick up or drop off a bike.
• The local gov­ern­ment wants to have 50,000 bikes at 2,000 sta­tions by the end of 2009.

We had the best day! The sys­tem works so well – enabling tour­ists to get out of the buses and into the real world, as well as entitling loc­als to a valu­able trans­port­a­tion option. Ser­i­ously, why don’t more cit­ies take up this initiative?

Hang­zhou | Photo by Amber Par­kin www.codeforsomething.com