Guest Photos: Barcelona Bicing

El primer día de Bicing, originally uploaded by Alícia.

A funktastic insight into Barcelona's Bicing bike share programme.
The photo was taken by Alícia on Flickr and shows two cycle chicsters trying out the Bicing bike on the first day.

There are many wonderful reasons to love city bikes and bike sharing programmes. Here at Copenhagen Cycle Chic we're particularly thrilled with one specific reason. People borrow the bikes in their regular clothes - preferably chic. You don't see anyone slapping on the lycra and all the other gear to head down to the city bike racks. Normal people riding bikes in normal clothes. That's one massive step towards normalising urban cycling.

After exploring the Bicing in Barcelona for this post, I realised that there are so many bike sharing programmes around Europe. I didn't realise there were so many. The big cities get the big press coverage, but there are over 100 cities in Europe with bike share progrommes, according to the very fine Bike-Sharing Blog. From Sevilla to Trondheim. From Dublin to Prague.

Roller & Coaster + Guest Photo From Lyon + Revolutionary La Rochelle

Gliding effortlessly towards the light, timing the change to green perfectly.

Once in awhile - not often enough for our liking - we discover a blog filled to the brim with fantastic wit and irony. In this case it's the Stuff White People Like Blog. At #61 - Bicycles. It's all brilliant satire, but I'm especially fond of this:

"... they love expensive Road Bikes and the accompanying spandex uniforms. This enables them to ride long distances and wear really tight clothes without any social stigmas. These types of riders will spend upwards of $5,000 on a bicycle and up to $400 on accessories, but will not ride to work. Perhaps because they cannot wear the spandex. It is important that you never question why someone needs a $5000 bicycle since the answer is always “performance."

A guest photo rolled into the inbox this morning:

I just stumbled upon Copenhagen Cycle Chic and I thought I'd send a couple of pics of my sweetheart looking bike-chic during our year using the Vélo'V bike-share program in Lyon, France. She finds the shots on your blog to be quite the inspiration, as do I, of course!, and is curious as to whether she is cycle-chic-worthy.

Sad to say, I send these pics to you from the cold climate of Edmonton in northern Alberta, Canada. Not one of the most bike-friendly towns....
Keep up the marvelous work! Matt.

Thanks to you and your sweetheart for thinking of us. There is no question in our minds that she qualifies for the much respected and sought after accolade of 'cycle chic'.

Matt's email reminded us of Lyon's bike share programme, Vélo'V. While much is written about the capital cities who have implemented bike sharing, like Paris, Barcelona and - coming soon - London, there are many cities in Europe that are already rolling. Lyon being one of them. It's a fair sized city, with almost 2 million inhabitants.


With all the hype about urban bike sharing, let's send a warm thought to the forgotten city that started it all, shall we? La Rochelle, on the French Atlantic coast [and favourite summer holiday destination for Wifealiciousness and I] had a legendary mayor back in the 1970's. He was quite the urban planning revolutionary. Inspired by Copenhagen, he created pedestrian streets in the city centre and, in 1974, he started a bike share programme.

He bought a load of yellow bikes and slapped them into racks by the harbour. The original idea was merely "take one, use it, bring it back." These days you can borrow them free for two hours if you leave some ID.

The programme never had, and still doesn't have, a fancy marketing name like ByCyklen, Velib, VeloV, SEVici or Bicing, which is probably why nobody knows about it. But La Rochelle was the first, so hats off to them.

Let's wrap todays cyclobabble with another photo of Copenhagen Cycle Chic, shall we?
Another fine example of matching your clothes with your bike.