A Bike, When You Need One

How many city folk have experienced the sudden need to get to another part of town, and quickly--the race is on, you think, as you calculate the time it will take to get your car out of the parking garage or flag down a taxi. "If only I had a bike right now," you lament, "I could just hop on and zip over."

Luckily for the health--and perhaps sanity--of urban dwellers, the system of bike sharing has caught on, and is spreading.

Yesterday, I was strolling in Busan when I ran into my first U-Bike stand. An inconspicuous rack of about 25 bikes with a screen kiosk made it easy for pedestrians to hop on and ride off to another part of the city (which, I must say, experiences snarling traffic rough enough to put a Manhattan-bred driver ill at ease).

The U-Bike stand in Busan is one of eight pilot programs in Korea, modeled after South Gyeongsang's Nubija (Nearby Useful Bike, Interesting Joyful Attraction) program of 20 stations, 430 bicycles for rent and over 3,000 users a day. Nubija, in case you're curious, was modeled after Paris' Vélib' program that launched in the summer of 2007 and now boasts "1,750 stations across the city and neighbouring suburbs [and has] a maximum of 24,000 bikes in operation at any one time," according to a 2010 Guardian Article by Leo Hickman.