Taiwan Today

For many Taipei City residents, 2013 represented the year of the YouBike rather than the year of the Snake (according to the Chinese Zodiac), as one would have been hard-pressed to stand on a downtown corner without catching a glimpse of a rider gliding past on one of the 17-kilogram, three-speed, publicly shared bicycles, which are affectionately known as “small little yellows.” (The ubiquitous yellow taxi cabs of Taiwan are called xiao huang, or “little yellows,” and the yellow-fendered YouBike has been given the nickname xiao xiao huang.) By the end of the year, 4,455 of these bikes had been stationed at 133 electronically monitored racks along the periphery of the city’s Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system grid. Meanwhile, the total number of YouBike rentals hit 10 million in November 2013, and ridership sometimes exceeded 60,000 on peak days.

“Lots of people try it just so they can say they have,” says King Liu (劉金標), founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Giant Manufacturing Co. Ltd., one of the world’s biggest bicycle brands and the company behind YouBike, which operates as a division of Giant Taiwan Sales Co. “YouBike is the in-thing—a fashion statement,” he says. “No one wants to admit they’ve never tried it.”

Today, YouBikes are available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. For registered users, renting one is as easy as making a single swipe with an EasyCard, the city’s public transportation smartcard. Those who have yet to sign up, locals and visitors alike, can take the bikes for a spin after registering their EasyCard and cellphone number at a kiosk located near the bike racks. To make renting a small little yellow even more convenient, the YouBike team created a mobile map app that displays the availability of bikes and parking slots for returned bikes at stations across the city.

The low cost of renting a YouBike likely has much to do with the system’s popularity. Thanks to a contribution from the Environmental Protection Administration, the first half hour is free. After that, fees are NT$10 (US$0.33) for each 30-minute block up to four hours, NT$20 (US$0.66) for each 30-minute block between four and eight hours, and NT$40 (US$1.33) for each 30-minute block thereafter. “At NT$10 [for the first hour], we believe YouBike is the cheapest bike share anywhere in the world except perhaps in China,” says Vicky Yang (劉麗珠), Liu’s daughter and spokeswoman for Giant’s YouBike Division.

Liu, 79, is perhaps Taiwan’s most visible cycling advocate, and for three decades has been lobbying the central government for the creation of bike lanes, traffic regulations and other amenities that promote cycling culture. He often repeats the tale of a foreign city mayor, who during a visit to Taiwan years ago, asked “If Taiwan is the world’s exporter of bikes, why don’t I see any cyclists out on the streets?” Liu still winces when he recalls that moment. “I didn’t know how to answer,” he says. Since then, of course, advocacy efforts by Liu and others have borne fruit, and Taiwan now has thousands of kilometers of urban and rural cycling lanes as well as YouBike and another bike share program in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan.

YouBike is one of more than 600 public bike sharing systems now operating in cities around the world. Large-scale urban bike sharing became a global phenomenon after Paris launched its Velib system in July 2007 with 7,000 bicycles (now 14,000) at 75 stations (now 1,230). The bicycles found an enthusiastic reception in the French capital, where users tallied 20 million rides in Velib’s first year.

While bike share systems are attractive because they can alleviate urban transportation problems, ensuring that they get the necessary funding is where things get tricky. Paul DeMaio is a Washington, D.C.-based transport planner who created MetroBike LLC, North America’s first bike-sharing consulting company. DeMaio explains that the systems operate under several different funding models, with some run by a local government or transport authority, others by universities or nonprofit foundations and still more by profit-seeking advertising companies. The most common by far is the advertising model, in which a company finances and operates a bike-sharing program in exchange for the right to display revenue-generating advertisements on billboards, bus shelters and kiosks. This approach, for example, is used in the Paris system by France-based JCDecaux Group, one of the world’s largest outdoor advertising companies.

YouBike stands apart because it is operated by Giant, a bicycle manufacturer, and because it seeks to become self-sustaining by relying solely on revenues generated by bicycle rentals. “Giant is the only bicycle maker in the world to run a bike share program because the others don’t think it can make money,” Liu says. “If YouBike loses money in the beginning, that’s okay,” he adds. “But YouBike has to make money eventually. Otherwise it won’t be sustainable. We will lose our dream [of Taiwan] being a cycling island.”

Prior to the Taipei system’s launch, a team led by Yang visited Paris to study the Velib system and ended up modeling YouBike after it. “We copied the Paris system,” Yang says. “Back then, YouBike user registration required a credit card and an EasyCard. That way we could keep track of the bikes. But lost or misplaced bikes were never a problem. Still, we didn’t have experience, so we used that system.”

Parisian Model

Initially, YouBike also tried the Parisian advertising business model. Cardif Assurance Vie, an insurance subsidiary of BNP Paribas Group, agreed to pay NT$2.5 million (US$75,600) for signage rights. The rest of the financing, according to Yang, included NT$10 million (US$302,600) from the Taipei City Department of Transportation while Giant offered a sum of NT$50 million (US$1.5 million). Effective from 2009, Giant agreed to operate the YouBike pilot program under the terms of a five-year contract.

The system’s early days were somewhat less than auspicious, however. The YouBike pilot program was launched in March 2009 on a small scale, with a mere 500 bicycles at 11 stations, all within a short radius of Taipei City Hall. But Taipei residents greeted YouBike with a yawn. Ridership remained abysmally low and the system bled money. Perhaps the biggest disincentive to potential users was the requirement of a credit card for registration. “There were a few high-frequency users, but the overall numbers were low,” Yang says. Another problem was that the 500-bike pilot program lacked scale. “Our first effort failed,” Liu says. “There were too few bikes, too close together in too small of an area.”

Two years passed and the number of riders remained low. On the hook for five years, Giant was losing more annually on YouBike than the government’s total outlay. Liu decided that when the contract for the pilot program expired, Giant would abandon the project. “I could tolerate the loss,” Liu says. “Even so, YouBike had yet to gain acceptance [by Taipei citizens], and the government couldn’t say it had accomplished anything.”

In 2011, when the Taipei City Government opened bidding to select the next YouBike vendor, Giant did not participate. “The bid failed,” Liu says.

With YouBike’s future temporarily in limbo, Lin Tse-ying (林志盈), then commissioner of Taipei City’s Department of Transportation, decided it was time to make another overture to Liu. “I was impressed by his sincerity,” Liu recalls. Dialogue ensued, and a thorough rethinking of YouBike began, including an analysis of the results of bike share systems around the world. “Here we exerted a lot of effort,” Liu says of the team’s research.

What the researchers discovered was that even cities like Paris and London, both of which enjoyed wildly celebrated, grand public bike share launches, were reporting increasing levels of user dissatisfaction, with the most common user complaint being the unavailability of bicycles. Other frequent criticism centered on inadequate maintenance that resulted in problems such as underinflated tires or poor shifting. Meanwhile, the team found that several of the international systems were experiencing increased theft and vandalism. “We decided that Taipei must be better, that Taipei’s bike share must be the world’s most welcoming, most accepted bike share,” Liu says. “To succeed, YouBike must set a world standard.”

The result of all the research was a plan that would expand the reach of the YouBike system in three stages. When the expansion was completed, the city would have 5,350 bikes and 162 stations and YouBikes would serve as a “last mile” nexus for commuters using Taipei’s MRT system. Internally, the YouBike team saw the “last mile” as the 100 or so meters between an MRT station and a commuter’s home, a distance for which the average person would feel reluctant to hail a taxi. Satisfied that the plan was workable, Giant signed a seven-year build-operate-transfer (BOT) contract with Taipei City’s transportation department, effective 2011, to operate the revamped YouBike system.

After all the research and rethinking, a greatly changed YouBike system emerged in 2012. “For one thing, we got rid of the credit card requirement,” Yang says. “Now, to register online, all that’s needed is a cellphone number and an EasyCard. Each account can list up to five EasyCards. Kids might not have a cellphone, so they can be included on a parent’s account.”

With more bikes, more rental stations and an easier registration system, YouBike ridership took off. To keep pace, the number of employees on the YouBike team expanded to more than 100, with most dedicated to the tasks of maintaining the small little yellows and assuring that there are enough of them in high-demand locations. With rentals reaching 60,000 on a busy day, one can easily imagine the thorny logistical problems in operating the YouBike fleet. During the morning rush hour, for example, commuters tend to pick up a bike near their home and park it near an MRT entrance. By mid-morning, that means there is a shortage of bicycles in residential areas and a surplus near subway lines.

To bring order to this chaos, Microprogram, an outside contractor, has managed YouBike’s cloud-based data processing requirements since the bike sharing system was launched. Microprogram’s employees track every YouBike transaction. “When a cyclist rents or returns a bicycle, a transmitter built into the station’s lock sends a wireless signal to the cloud,” explains Tony Wu (吳騰彥), the company’s founder and CEO. “From this, we always know how many bikes are in use and how many are at each station.”

Each day, the YouBike system generates as much as a gigabyte of data, which Wu’s 30-employee work group stores and maintains on the company’s own servers. Wu calls it a typical job for a “big data” client, except that the financial stakes are smaller. “The number of transactions is high, but the income per transaction is low, say NT$10 [US$0.33] per rental,” Wu says. As limited income means a limited operating budget, Microprogram had to forgo purchasing a proprietary relational database management system and turn to an open source alternative instead. “That allowed us to write a schema to fit the data and provide the fastest possible operation,” Wu says.

Roving Movers

In the field, meanwhile, YouBike deploys 63 “movers” who rove the streets of Taipei on small little yellows using PDAs that receive alerts generated by the number crunchers at Microprogram. If YouBikes pile up in one place, movers pedal to the scene, remove extra bikes and store them at a staging area. Later, other movers arrive by truck and ferry the bikes to a location where they are running out. Members of the roving crew also watch for bikes with seats that have been turned sideways across the frame—a signal that a YouBike user has experienced problems with the bicycle—and report such incidents to maintenance staff.

Designing the YouBike itself was a challenge. Liu and his design team realized that the bikes had to sustain heavy use by men, women and children of all fitness levels. They had to be suitable for everyone from novice to expert cyclists wearing everything from casual clothing to office attire. The requirements were seemingly endless: YouBikes needed to withstand exposure to the elements year ’round, needed to be safe, needed to be theft-proof and on and on.

The YouBikes pressed into service so far have proven something of a marvel to urban cycling aficionados, although Giant continues to tweak the design. The first thing experienced riders notice about a YouBike is the oddly paired wheels—24-inch (61 centimeters) in front and 26-inch (66 centimeters) in back, an innovation decreed by Liu because it makes the bike easier for novice cyclists to set in motion. But the list of YouBike innovations is long, including lights that flash automatically when one starts to ride, on-board bike locks, weather resistant paint and coatings, extra-thick tires and more.

Has YouBike won the hearts of Taipei commuters by creating the world’s “most welcoming, most accepted” urban bike sharing program? Will YouBike survive after it is turned over to the city government in 2017? Yang believes the answer to these questions is yes. YouBike took in NT$120 million (US$4 million) in rental income in 2012, and she believes the system will be self-sustaining. “BOT will be a great deal for the government,” she says. Under the present agreement, Giant keeps 85 percent of rental income and returns 15 percent to the Taipei City Government. When the contract expires in 2017, the city will take ownership of all YouBike hardware and will receive all income. “[Taipei] will get its initial investment back plus more, and it will own the system,” Yang says.

Looking ahead, Yang sees YouBike as a growing social phenomenon. “On weekends, I see so many happy couples riding around on YouBikes,” she says. “We’re expecting YouBike weddings, you know.”

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Glenn Smith is a freelance writer based in Taipei.

Bike Sharing Nation

YouBike is not Taiwan’s only bike share program, nor was it the first. The Kaohsiung City Public Bike System—C-bike—beat Taipei to the punch by 11 days by launching on March 1, 2009. The system in southern Taiwan’s largest city tallies more than 1 million rentals annually. In fact, more bike share programs may be on the way, as Hsinchu in northern Taiwan, Taichung in the center and Tainan in the south have plans on the drawing board.

Not all cities are created equal, however, when it comes to bike sharing, says Chang Hsin-wen (張馨文), head of the College of Tourism’s Department of Leisure and Recreation Planning and Management at Chung Hua University in Hsinchu. “Taipei and Kaohsiung have bike sharing systems designed for commuters, as both have sufficient population density and rapid transit systems with short stops,” she says. “Taichung and Hsinchu, by contrast, are sprawling cities with less clearly defined downtown areas and lots of hills.”

But it is possible to have a small, closed bike share program within a section of a city that serves leisure and recreation purposes, she explains. Chang, with the help of Chung Hua’s information and communications technology department, received a one-time grant from the Ministry of Economic Affairs to create such an experimental bike share system for her school’s campus.

“Next year, we’ll be helping Hsinchu design a bike share system,” Chang says. “It’ll be small—a single square kilometer—but it’ll be rich in historic attractions.”

“The way people in Taiwan think about bicycling is changing,” Chang says, reflecting on her decade helping the government develop bike lanes from Hsinchu to Yilan on the northeast coast.

“Initially, bike lanes were viewed from a civil engineering perspective,” she says. “The lanes got built but no one wanted to ride them. Now the thinking is about the end-user, and how the bike network fits in with local tourism attractions.”

—Glenn Smith

Copyright © 2014 by Glenn Smith