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Nihan Akyelken, University of Oxford, UK
The reliance on innovative ideas has become even more evident in the post-crisis economy: there is a widely-held belief that we need new products and services and new ways of doing things. Innovations are all over the economy and are almost considered to be rescuers of the current adverse societal trends. Urban mobility is a policy area, where several technological and behavioural changes are currently widespread; for example driverless cars, car-less drivers, online ridesharing platforms, app-based taxi schemes, and bike sharing schemes. Bike sharing schemes (BSS) are particularly interesting due to their increasingly crucial role in public transport systems in cities. At first sight, they seem to be most compliant with the existing governance system amongst all, but a closer look into their emergence and diffusion still yields interesting insights into how “the public versus private debate” is changing.
Bike sharing refers to shared use of a bicycle fleet provided on a temporary basis. BSS have positive impacts on urban sustainability through reliving congestion, reducing air pollution in cities and providing public health benefits. While it dates back to 1960s in Amsterdam, where bicycles were placed in the city centre randomly for free use, bike sharing has attracted significant attention in the policy and academic discourse particularly since the 2000s (e.g. Fishman et al., 2013). Many current BSS entail the use of information technology (IT) (Shaheen et al., 2010). The questions of who are the (targeted) users, where bikes are placed and how the system is governed have significant implications for access and eventually for social exclusions. Social implications of sharing practices can only be understood by elucidating the emergent political economy of these innovations particularly in terms of their emergence.
The emergence of bike sharing is defined in terms of chronological stages, i.e. through four generations. These include the White Bikes in Amsterdam in 1960s, coin-operated sharing systems, IT-enabled bike sharing systems and demand-responsive and multi-modal systems (Shaheen et al., 2010). While this chronological typology of the four generations of BSS is useful for elucidating the lessons learned from different experiences, it may be misleading to understand the emergence of bıke sharing across historical contexts. For example, it should be noted that the White Bikes in 1960s was initiated by an environmental activist group (Walks et al., 2015), while the coin-operated schemes and IT-based systems have been run by public and private bodies. The key actors in the emergence of the schemes may determine how the schemes develop over time. Why and how bike sharing came into existence is an important question that should not be hidden within chronological typologies. Without looking into these drivers, it is almost impossible to assess the social implications and whether or why we need bike sh