In the last couple of years, bike sharing has become hugely popular in China and some other places around the world. So far, despite being the birthplace of car sharing apps like Uber, the US has been slow to take up the two-wheeled trend. But as Mark Niu reports, that could be about to change.

 

In San Jose, California, Ford GoBike celebrates a US first, a bikesharing program, that give users air miles on Alaska Airlines when they purchase a ride. It's good for the environment and good for your health. And now, you can even earn air mileage points while you bikeshare. While big name companies put their name on the bikes, the technology is developed by a company called "Motivate". Motivate says it operates 2/3 of the total bikesharing fleet in the US.

 

"I don't think there's any question that biking in urban centers in the U.S. has been late to come. One of the things that you are seeing is that cities in the U.S. are investing in safe biking infrastructure. And increasingly, as technology changes, it makes it more and more flexible for people."

 

It's $3 for a 30-minute ride from station to station, though special programs can run as low as $5 a year for low-income residents. Motivate has worked very closely with each city to determine the best location, something Chinese bikesharing company Bluegogo failed to do when it began deploying its bikes on the streets of San Francisco, that irked the city and competitors like Motivate who played by the rules. Eventually, Bluegogo pulled out.

 

SHILOH BALLARD PRESIDENT, SILICON VALLEY BIKE COALITION "Our fear in the bike advocacy community is that nobody will succeed. Everybody will cannibalize each other. But on the flipside is that you have all these people competing which is an indication that there is something there."

 

The newest wave of competition comes from startups like Spin. Spin offers dockless bikes at cutthroat rates, just $1 for 30-minutes of riding. A solar-powered unit unlocks the bike with the swipe of a QR code while GPS tracks where it goes.

 

EUWYN POON CO-FOUNDER & PRESIDENT, SPIN "Dealing with theft and vandalism, that's fortunately baked into our business model, certain amount of loss and attrition of our fleet that we comfortably accept. What we've done in this business model is remove the onus on the user to return it to a certain place and place the onus on ourselves as a company. We have sprinter vans running around re-balancing bikes. That's the new thing in the bikeshare economy where we have hourly workers that go in and pick up bikes from areas of low use and bring them back to areas of high use."

 

In operation for less than a year, Spin says it has more than 3,000 bikes in 9 US markets, such as Mountain View and Seattle. Spin's bikes also collect data on every ride, information that's shared with cities so they not only know where each bike is, but also where to plan bike routes down the road. Mark Niu, CGTN, San Francisco.