As the G20 participants travel to Hangzhou, China, in fuel-guzzling passenger jets, their Chinese hosts are putting them to shame by pedaling around the city on eco-friendly bicycles. The Hangzhou Public Bicycle program is the largest in the world and is largely self-financing. Anyone can hop on a bike, as long as they have a smartphone and the WeChat app.
The Chinese are killing many birds with one stone. Bike-sharing in the city of Hangzhou in Zhejiang province in East China is reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving people’s health and advancing the mobile digital economy — all without any cost to the taxpayer. But the government did fork out $26 million to launch the program in 2008 and with almost $40 million in discounted loans.
EcoWatch ranked Hangzhou’s Public Bicycle program as the best biking system worldwide; it is also the largest. There are an estimated 66,500–78,000 bicycles in the city in roughly 2,700 stations. By 2020, 175,000 bikes are expected to be traversing the city.
But the program’s development has not been without hiccups. According to EcoWatch, an app was first created in 2010 that revealed the number of bikes at each station — apparently, the developers’ doing. While this was useful for users, it was an inconvenience for the program’s staff and an illegal action according to them. In 2012, the Public Bicycle powers that be blocked the developers from accessing the information, and the app was useless.
No such nonsense will be allowed as the city welcomes participants to the G20 summit to be held on Sept. 4 and 5, 2016. In fact, according to China Daily, Hangzhou’s bike-sharing service now allows anyone with a smartphone to rent a bike by scanning a QR code, and practically everybody has a smartphone.
A smartphone is essential in the city because everything can be bought, ordered and delivered through Alipay or WeChat Pay. The bike program does have an official app, but users don’t have to download it if they have WeChat, which goes hand-in-hand with a smartphone — among Chinese consumers at least.
Maintaining the bikes cost 80 million yuan (~$12 million) in 2015, but the company claims to have covered the costs by selling ads and has not used taxpayers’ money.
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