The Hindu Business Line : Getting back on the bike

The tour de France, the world’s premier cycling event, just finished for this year. Even after discounting for the scandals associated with drug-enhanced performance of the lead riders, there is a thrill as we watch the participants whiz past the camera.

Those bikes that operate on the same basic principle as the ones that we ride about our neighbourhood package an amazing amount of technology. The materials used are sometimes spin-offs from those developed as part of space research. These bikes are light, strong, and fast. It is an amazing marriage of hi-tech with basic transportation. Some of those bikes can cost almost as much as a small car.

Economists have a curious term, penumbra goods, for such products (another is the hurricane lantern), when modern equipment and technology are used to produce a good of an earlier generation.

The bike will perhaps be an immortal good. Some estimate that about 60 per cent of the world’s bikes are made in China, but few of them are on Chinese roads anymore.

The humble bike is possibly facing extinction in China. Beijing’s roads, which used to be full of bicycles in the good old days of communism, are now jam-packed with cars in the days of capitalism as people rush forward to get rich and display their success.

In the psyche of people in the developing world, the bike is decidedly a poor man’s transportation, right at the bottom of the totem pole, just above the two feet we are born with. When I went looking for a bike to hire in Chennai and Bangalore, I was first quizzically looked at as perhaps representing an alien life-form, and then warned not to entertain such an idea in the chaos of our city streets if I value my life.

As people prosper, they get out of bikes, and onto faster and better things. Even the Wright Brothers, who began in business making bikes ended up with airplanes! While the residents of China and India are looking for ways to move into powered transportation and progress beyond their bikes, the citizens of northern Europe are taking to bikes with a vengeance.

A trend that began many years ago on grounds of health and reducing city congestion has now the added justification of being environmentally friendly.

If you step off the pavement in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, you are more likely to be run over by a bicycle, than by a car. I saw a mother in Amsterdam riding her bike with groceries in the back carriage, two children in a carriage in front, and one hand holding an umbrella! Amsterdam has about one bike for every person, and they all seemed to be on the roads on their bikes at the same time.

It is said that the Dutch Prime Minister sometimes rides a bike to work (accompanied, presumably, by security also on bikes). And local etiquette pours woe on the pedestrian who wanders onto the bike path. Between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of commuters in these two cities get to work on their bikes.

The civic authorities are sympathetic. The bike paths are sometimes as wide as the car lane in these cities. The buses have a special carriage that allows you to hoist the bike onto it and ride the bus. The subway trains allow you to take the bike with you in the train. There are aggressive plans for the future. Denmark plans to significantly increase the number of kilometres of bike lanes it has.

A business school I visited in Copenhagen has a basement bike parking garage, with automatic doors and a ramp! In the future, there would even be ‘bike-only’ bridges, and high parking fees to discourage people from driving.

Guide-books tell the tourist where he/she can rent a bike, listed right next to the listings for car hire. Copenhagen provides free bikes during the summer months. There are bike racks around the city centre where you make a nominal 20 Dkk (Rs 149) deposit and get it back when you return it to any rack.

Each time you are on the bike, it would do good to remember you are saving some emission of carbon dioxide by avoiding the car or the bus. Now, if only the authorities would extend the market where people trade emission credits so as to give bike-riders points that they could sell in the open market to car-owners, we could begin making an even greater impact!

Web-based car sharing services

Let’s move to another hi-tech effort to seduce away car ownership. Meet the companies called Zipcar and Flexcar in the US, currently operating in select cities of the east and west coast. They are Web-based car sharing services, a rental scheme that is meant to provide the convenience of access to use of a car without ownership and without long-term rental.

In a conventional car rental agency, you would have to rent for at least a whole day, and the rental rates can vary making it more attractive to rent for a few days at a stretch.

With the Zipcar, you pay a membership (or commit to a minimum spending per month) that entitles you to book and use a car when you want it. Cars are parked in several places around the city (Zipcar has over 100 locations in Boston), in parking lots and garages close to residential areas. When you need the car, say to do some shopping for a few hours, you can book the car online. The company sends a signal to the computer gizmo in the car.

When you hold your membership card near the gizmo (under the windshield), it matches the information in your card with what has been received and allows you to open the door. (It won’t open if you have not reserved.)

The dashboard has the keys which allow you to start the car and drive away. The rental rates are a fixed fee per hour plus a rate per mile, and includes cost of gasoline and insurance.

These rates are designed such that it is not attractive to use the car for a whole day or for a weekend, in which case it is better to rent one from the conventional car rental agencies.

When you are done with your trip, you leave the car back in the same reserved spot from which you took it. The system is ideal, if you are living in the city, do not have the place to park a car, and do not need to have one since you depend largely on public transport to get to work.

Starting in Boston, Zipcar has now expanded to New York and Washington DC, and hopes to expand to many more cities. The Flexcar operates in San Francisco.

New York is seriously considering a high fee for vehicles that are brought into busy Manhattan, just as London has introduced a tariff for cars brought into the city.

Congestion and environmental reasons are driving various creative responses to transportation at the individual and community levels. Let’s start by bringing back the bike!

(The author is a professor of international business and strategic management at Suffolk University, Boston, US. He can be reached at cgopinat@suffolk.edu)

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