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!
And 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?
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That’s such a brilliant idea. I really think the UK needs to be a bit more clued up on transport, in London it’s so expensive and there are better ways to see the city than from underground!
I’m quite obsessively stalking your adventures abroad, it looks like you’re having a magnificant time!
That is so cool.
Ahh, I love stuff like that. Copenhagen is totally a bike city, we have bike lanes everywhere, which is great! We also have a bike sharing system, kind of like that, except less modern I guess. You deposit a 20kr coin in the bike, and take it out again when you’re done using the bike! You can take it all around the center of the city and is a great way for tourists to save money, get some exercise and enjoy the fresh air!
Ah I love this. Moving to a bike city next I swear. Amsterdam or Copenhagen maybe.
Your photos have such great colours.
I have seen that system quite a bit too! Oslo has a pretty good one with stations all over the place.
Its no wonder why in China they call HZ Paradise on Earth. Its a great place to live which is why I call it home.
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