In my schooldays in Coimbatore, Tamilnadu, bicycles were the prime
mode of transport for the middle-class. The affluent among my
class-mates came to school in own bikes. My parents didn’t get me
one till I joined college in New Delhi. By which time (this, in late
50s) bicycling went out of fashion.
With aggressive marketing
of Luna, scooty, and other two-wheelers bicycles became a poor man’s
vehicle. We, who considered ourselves better-off on the social scale,
preferred the rush, long wait and uncertainty of public transport to a
bicycle for travelling to work. Coming to office on a bike wasn’t an
executive thing. Clerks biked to work.
Today, the good old bike
could be an answer to traffic congestion and carbon emission in
Bangalore,if only office-goers and company executives take to the bike
in a big way, making bicycling a fashionable mode of transit, as they
have done in Paris. One would like to see Anil Kumble and Shivrajkumar
going to work on a bike;see Rahul Dravid with a bicycle in lifestyle
media ads. Major IT companies - Infosys, IBM, Yahoo and others - could
promote use of bicycles.
They could cut-back on car allowance
and offer, instead, bicycle bonus to employees. And those who give up
their cars for bicycles could be considered for telecommuting. Maybe
IIM-B students could take up a project to explore the prospects of
putting in place (are you and your project group reading this, Reema
Mahajan?) bicycle rentals service in Bangalore on the pattern of
Velib’ of Paris.
The New York Times, in
a recent article –
A New Fashion
Catches On in Paris: Cheap Bicycles Rentals – gives us an idea
of how the system works. Maybe we can’t replicate it in all aspects,
for Bangalore isn’t quite Paris; but the concept could be
emulated.
The highlights of the Paris bicycle rentals:
1)The
bikes are cheap to rent, as they are subsidized by advertising; some
20,600 bicycles are for hire, from 1,450 rental stations.
2)Annual
subscription (29 euros) lets user take a bike whenever needed for 30
minutes at a time without extra-charge. It is reckoned 96 percent of
all rides are less than 30-minute duration (and hired bikes can be
returned at any convenient location).
3)Bicycles theft rate – 15
percent in the first year of operation. About 1,500 bikes a day come
in for repairs.
4)Bikes can be rented on hourly basis, for a day,
and also on weekly basis.
5)The 10-year contract for running
bicycle rentals has been taken up, not by a transport contractor but a
major PR and advertising company – JCDecaux.
