Business Ideas in Romania

Need a ride? Get a bike

• Posted by Sinziana on December 11th, 2007 filed in Services, Transportation

Opportunity: bike renting system

Just one glance on the streets of Bucharest at the beginning or end of a workday and anyone would easily understand that traffic is one of our biggest daily headaches. Working people in Bucharest nowadays spend anywhere from one and a half to three hours a day in their cars or public transport system. Welcome to the civilized world!

Of course we are not the first and certainly not the last to be confronted with such problems. So, naturally, a wise thing to do is look at our western neighbors to see how they dealt with their traffic problem…and made a business out of it!

Paris, end of November, general strike in the public transportation so traffic is a nightmare. Just the thought of it discourages you from trying to go anywhere. But no, wait, now there are the Velib bikes that can take you to your destination fast and cheap.

The Velib bike system is a bike rental initiative of the town hall of Paris initiated in July 2007. Anyone owning a credit card can get a bike from one of the 750 bike stations across the city and leave it at the station closest to his or her destination. The stations are automatic bike rental places with some 10-15 bike slots each that are placed every 300 meters (this is a goal yet to be achieved). You go, insert your card, get a 1 day, 1 week or 1 year subscription to the Velib system (between EUR1 and EUR29), block a EUR150 amount as deposit and then you can use any bike from any station for free for the first half an hour and for around EUR1.50 for every extra half hour. The bike is being tracked by an electronic system, which, based on your unique subscription number and the chip that goes with every bike, knows exactly where each bike is at every moment and who took it for a ride.

Brilliant! The result is a cheap way of transportation that is environmentally friendly and reduces traffic by encouraging people to use bikes for their short distance (less than half our) errands. The only thing you need to know is where the closest bike station is.

But how can this be turned into a business model? Simple: advertisements. The whole system, while initiated by the town hall, is actually run by a media Advertiser JCDecaux, which gained in return for exclusive rights to 1,600 billboards around the city. I assume that with over 3 mn rides clocked in the first 2 and a half months of functioning, the adds are making quite a powerful impact …and a lot of money!

Bucharest is, indeed, a bit immature for this kind of a system although a slight impulse towards using bikes was already made by the town-hall with the new bike routes that appeared across the city. However, with more work on the bike lanes and the growing reliance in debit and credit cards, maybe Bucharest can soon be ready to welcome such traffic reducing ideas. Until then though, more bike rental places would be welcome.