On 16th of June 2012, the pilot phase of Beijing municipal public bicycle sharing service was inaugurated in Dongcheng and Chaoyang districts with 2,000 bicycles and 63 rental stations. Bicycle sharing is becoming more and more popular among Chinese cities.
Newly released factsheet on Bicycle Sharing in Beijing:
Decades ago, the bicycle used to be a predominant transport mode in China so that China was known as the “Kingdom of Bicycles”. With the booming economy and urbanisation in the later 1990s, which have subsequently led to rapid motorisation, China is eventually losing this transport “style”. The share of cycling in the total modal split has dramatically declined in many Chinese cities. In order to ease this situation, Beijing municipal government has implemented a series of policies to promote public transit, one of which was to establish Beijing’s first municipal-lead public bicycle sharing system.
