By Eric Britton

A bicycle? Two spindly wheels held together by a frail metal frame and launched into wobbly motion by feet to trundle you from A to B. First introduced in Paris almost two hundred years ago (1817 model, see picture), the bike has enjoyed moments of great glory and moments of ... neglect.

Made to Measure Bicycle. So why now, eight years into the 21st Century, should I be taking your time to talk about something that is so small, so trivial, so out of date, so surely meaningless in an age in which the problems of our planet are enormous and in so many ways crushing us to the mat? To make any sense of the importance of the bicycle and what a renaissance of this sensible form of transportation could mean for our cities and our daily lives, let’s have a quick glance out the rearview mirror.

Look back to the eighth year of the 20th Century. As we live and work, go to school and play, in American cities of that time, we get around by our feet, by bicycle, and by some combination of buses, trams and trains.  Of course cars were also on the streets, but these were not really available to most of us.

Then as greater prosperity reared its supposedly beautiful head in the wake of the Second World War, more and more people started to have another transportation option in the form of their own car.  It was, just about everyone said, a great and wonderful thing.

And then, slowly, and without our really being quite aware, cars started to change a lot of things in our daily lives and in our cities.  This story has been told many times, but the essence of it is that this new bit of technology transformed and, in a huge number of cases, virtually ripped apart our cities. So in place after place, the city fell apart and most people moved “out of town”.

This revolution is based upon the “City Bike”, or Public Bicycle System, which is probably today the fastest growing transportation innovation in the world. The basic principle is that a city creates a public transport system based on free (or almost free) bicycles which you can pick up at many points around the city, ride to get you where you want to go, and then leave at another handily located station.

Today there are more than 100 public bike systems underway, the most famous being the huge new system created in Paris last summer under the name Vélib’ (roughly free bike). There are more than 15,000 currently in service and with the full fleet up to 20,000 by the end of this year. Other large systems are in operation or underway in Barcelona, Lyon, Rome, Berlin, and in North America there are several dozen cities looking carefully at this idea, with projects about to be launched in Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal, Vancouver and Washington DC.

What is most promising about these new transportation systems is how efficiently and simply they work. Think of them as tiny transit vehicles you can pick up where you want, when you want, go to exactly where you want and leave them there. They offer the same convenience of the car but without all the problems—from parking to traffic jams to pollution to sprawl.  They are truly a form personal rapid transit.

For more on these projects see the World City Bike Collaborative of the New Mobility Agenda at http://www.citybike.newmobility.org/.

Eric Britton is an American political scientist, economist and sustainability activist who has lived in France since 1969. He is founder of  EcoPlan International, the New Mobility Agenda and the Commons.