So, great idea.

BTW, there is an underlying cost: before such a system can be introduced, there has to be a bike road network first. Tough it ewxist in much of (North) Western Europe, elsewhere, there is a great lagging behind.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

BTW, a Velo'v station has opened a few days ago in front of the building where I live , and there one within 50 m of my office, so I plan to use it a lot!

"Dieu se rit des hommes qui se plaignent des conséquences alors qu'ils en chérissent les causes" Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

I observed a similar, pioneering scheme some years ago in Copenhagen, where they do have an extensive bike road network. My neighbour, a banker, would go to the office each day on his (own) bike, but he had facilities to shower and change there, which in most cities is the exception. Besides, once he slipped in the rain and broke his arm. I met plenty of other Danes who had accidents on their bikes, and once observed a terrible collision of the bus in which I was riding with a cyclist.

The public bikes in Copenhagen were mostly used by tourists; I tried one out once. However, I seem to remember that there was a problem with bikes not being returned, and you could sometimes see vandalised public bikes in ditches, years later.

I am all for using the bike, but on a mass scale they need an extensive infrastructure to be safe, and they  are much too easily stolen. (If memory serves, in Denmark at the time, only 2% of something like 90 000 yearly bicyle thefts were cleared up.)  

I suspect it has something to do with the fact that you can't carry merchandise with the bikes. They need to make bikes where a woman can carry her daily or weekly groceries safely. I don't see baskets attached to the bike that would allow that.

Plenty of utility trailers, specialised bikes, and luggage for conventional bikes are available for hauling Stuff.  I haul a fair amount of stuff and almost never need to borrow a car.  And for the price of a car, sheesh, you could own a fleet of bikes and trailers.

Perceptions of cycling risk are imho grossly exaggerated.  40,000 people die yearly in the US inside cars, only about 700-800 while cycling -- despite the "terribly dangerous" nature of cycling.  I myself have cycled pretty regularly -- on surface streets, not sidepaths -- for over 30 years and my only crashes have been at very low speed, and resulted in only a few scrapes and bruises.  However the perception that cycling is dangerous is very persistent (it is the most common excuse I hear among Americans for not cycling or walking:  "it's too dangerous" or "I won't do it until the government builds me a bike road network") and this discourages millions of people from cycling -- hence they drive a lot more, increasing the moderate but genuine danger to others who cycle or walk.

An interesting feature of cycling safety is that the only really consistent correlation with cyclist safety is number of cyclists.  Everything else -- road engineering, prosthetic interventions like helmets and pads -- everything except, possibly, night lighting (though even this may be confounded by Dutch results) -- has only minor, or contested effects.  But afaik in all longitudinal studies there is a strong correlation between the number of cyclists on the roads and the risk per cyclist.  The more common cycling is in a country, the safer each cyclist is.

Which means, of course, that the most effective thing any of us can do to make cycling safer is to go out there and do it :-)

On a related note, the BMJ once concluded that, weighing up the health benefits of regular exercise via cycling vs the risk factors of road cycling, the average road cyclist was 20 times more likely to extend his or her lifetime than to curtail it by cycling regularly.  The leading causes of death in the US last time I looked were smoking and cardiovascular unfitness.  Not too many cyclists smoke (you need your lung power) and most are, even if not athletic (I'm not), fairly robust in the cardio department.

I also know several people with back, hip, shoulder problems who are not able to walk or run but can cycle at low speed in comfort, and use their bikes as a "mobility aid".  So the notion that older folks are automatically disqualified from cycling also seems highly questionable to me.  I'm pushing 50 myself and can ride 30 miles for pleasure without collapsing (and believe me I am morphologically closer to Yogi Bear than Lance Armstrong).

A friend of mine has a sig that I think bears on the discussion:  It is easier to act your way in to a new way of thinking, than to think your way into a new way of acting.  If we start by thinking that riding a bike is dangerous and difficult then the action (actually doing it) will never happen;  but if we start by actually riding the bike, the odds are that whole new ways of travelling and thinking may result.  At least that is what happened for me.  I now regard trips in a car or plane as brief experiences of inhumane incarceration, which leave me longing to get back on my bike and enjoy real freedom.  But as they say, "Your mileage may vary."

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

The system read the chip on your bank card as ID.  You had to register and provide a password.  The first hour was free, then started charging your bank account automatically for every hour afterwords.  Should the bike have been abandoned, the system would stop charging per hour and would charge a 600 euro replacement cost.

At the start it was unfriendly to tourists (however you could go to a tourism office and get a day card or something) - but slowly I think they made some changes to improve it.

Myself, I would have seen if I could have set it to take any Maestro card with a chip (majority of European bank cards).  That way the majority of tourists could have used it if they pleased.

I used it a lot - I learned the traffic light timings on Franz-Josef Kai rather quickly.  I also learned to get my way around the first district without a map.

"now this is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." W. Churchill