The Bicyclist International

What is it about bicycles being all of a sudden so popular around the world lately? Did anybody have any notice of this creeping bicycle revolution? I have certainly not!

Europeans are well known for their love of bicycles... But now the wave of revolutionary rise of bikes’ being promoted throughout the world’s largest urban centers has reached the cities of Russia and the U.S.A. It turns out that special committees had been formed that spent last year analyzing financial and logistical challenges that face introducing bikes onto the streets of our major cities, to ensure related policy decisions do not make bike projects needlessly controversial. Unprecedented comprehensive examinations of bicycling have been carried out, too.

According to those researchers, one thing which is in common with all major cities across Europe, as well as the U.S. and Russia, is that bicycling becomes more mainstream. The main conclusion of the bicycle transportation policy research programs in general is that a greater percentage of urban workers are commuting by bikes. Although, ridership drops sharply during the winter and on weekends.

Aside from a recently growing number of articles and blogs on how exhilarating bicycling is and how it makes you feel younger and freer, certain concrete steps have been made to urge the middle class workers to leave their cars and SUVs behind and use bikes instead, in order to commute about the city.

The U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) has put hard data behind a trend that has become evident to anyone living in a major city: young people are not into cars anymore. PIRG found that per capita, Americans drive the same number of miles each year as they did back in 1996. The biggest declines in driving since 2009 come from Millennials (people born between 1983 and 2000), who congregate in cities tend to walk, take transit and bike.

Last week, Moscow Department of Transport and Road Infrastructure Development has started bike-share program in the Russian capital. Moscow installed, throughout its center, thirty stations containing two hundred and twenty red city bikes. A Czech company provided the bikes, stations, and support. The bicycle-sharing system resembles the Citi Bike program launched recently in New York.

The U.S. biggest bicycle-sharing initiative launched in New York, is the combination of Main Street and Wall Street. It serves as a mobility alternative for city denizens and is supported without taxpayer subsidy by $41 million in sponsorship from the U.S. third largest bank holding company Citigroup, $6.5 million from the U.S. multinational financial services corporation MasterCard and financing from the Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group, which is a fund of Goldman Sachs Group, Merchant Banking Division specializing in investments in corporations operated or owned by ethnic minorities and real estate developers targeting urban communities. The fund usually seeks an investment horizon of five to seven years for an investment.

New York's Citi Bike is a privately financed program rolled out in late May with 6,000 bikes at more than 300 bright blue stations where riders pay to unlock the sturdy, three-gear cruising bikes, take them for rides, and return them to any rack in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and eventually Queens. Plans call for expanding the system to 10,000 bikes at 600 stations across a crowded city Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been outfitting with bike lanes and traffic-calming devices, all the while promoting bicycling as a healthy and environmentally friendly alternative to driving.

Citi Bike subscribers pay a $95 annual fee for unlimited rides of 45 minutes. Riders can also purchase a 24-hour pass for about $9.95, and a weekly pass for $25. Usage time is recorded when a bicycle is returned to a rack, with fees added if the bike is out past the allotted time. City officials report as many as 15,000 people already have signed up, and 100,000 rides were logged in the first 10 days.

One of hundreds of bike-sharing systems around the world, New York's is the biggest in the United States. One frequent problem with previous "free" bike sharing programs has been the widespread disappearance of bikes. The City is splitting rider fees with NYC Bike Share LLC, a company running the program.

The bikes are manufactured by Quebec-based PBSC Urban Solutions - also known as Bixi - that provided the vehicles for 10 similar programs in cities including Melbourne, Boston, and London. They were conceived by industrial designer Michel Dallaire and engineers at the bicycle maker Devinci. Together they set out to create a virtually indestructible machine, capable of surviving the hydra-headed assault of neglect and vandalism.

“This bike is too strong for one person only,” says Bruno Gauthier, chief engineer at Devinci. “It’s like a Hummer. It’s too much power. This bicycle is built for the urban jungle.”

The bicycle-sharing program, launched almost simultaneously around the biggest cities in Russia and the U.S. this year, bespeaks a close coordination on an international basis. The project originated from and is financed by the largest multinational financial services corporations and bank holding companies in the world. The notorious "banksters" seem to be behind this global initiative all along, again. That fact alone makes their recent international bicycle revolution look a little bit suspicious, at least.

The major goal of that program most probably is to reduce the usage of conventional vehicles as means of transportation by the majority of the middle class workers. If that will turn our cities into Amsterdams and Copenhagens is not clear. Certainly, the bicycle activists have scored some wins. So have the manufacturers who produce bikes for big European and American companies. But whether it will make the world’s working class happier remains to be seen.