Features / Bristol
New hire bike scheme coming to Bristol
On the streets of London, hire bikes are a ubiquitous site. That’s the trick – to flood the city with the bikes so that they are easily available.
While Boris Bikes in the capital need to be left at special docking stations, a new breed of hire bike coming to Bristol this month can be locked anywhere.
The yellow YoBike might soon become as much part of the daily life on the streets of Bristol as late buses and roadworks, with the city chosen as the first in Europe to launch the scheme.
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YoBike is the brainchild of Chinese tech entrepreneur Bin Wang, who was named as one of China’s 30 under 30 entrepreneurs by Forbes magazine in 2013.
The canary yellow bikes will arrive with a grand fanfare on Tuesday, but Bristol24/7 had an exclusive trial of one of the bikes last week.
It’s a simple concept: download the app, find a bike on a map, scan the QR code to unlock the built-in lock above the back wheel and you’re away, for as little as £1 per ride with the bike being able to be left anywhere.
After having to recharge our phone, our bike took us to first to College Green, locking it outside Swoon before picking up some fish and chips to take away from Catch 22.
The next morning it was time to vote in the metro mayor elections:
And then take the cross-harbour ferry on the way to Wapping Wharf for a morning coffee.
The bike has three gears and is a bit of a bone shaker across cobbles, but it is sturdy and ideal for short city journeys.
Bristol’s hills could prove a problem and there is also the problem of riders not having a helmet nor a fully-charged phone.
But organisers of the scheme hope that users of it will form a community – if for example there is a bike languishing on the far edges of Bristol somebody might be given free credit for cycling it back into the city centre.
By the end of this month, there could be 500 of the aluminium-alloy bikes with inbuilt GPS tracking systems on the streets of Bristol.
Expect YoBikes to soon become a familiar sight.
For more information, visit www.yobike.co.uk.
Read more: ‘My crush began on a bicycle’
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