Towards a national rent-a-bike system at destination stations. Relatively few travellers use a bicycle for the egress part of their trip. In order to give the weakest part of the public transport travel, the 'egress trip', a positive impulse, the Dutch government initiated an innovation programme to develop attractive solutions for bicycle rental systems at destination stations. For this purpose, several initiations received a development subsidy. The most ambitious of these was the 'OV-fiets' (PT-bike) concept aiming at creating a countrywide system of easy bicycle rental, thus making the rented bicycle a component of the Dutch public transportation system. An evaluation of the subsidised initiatives shows that a countrywide bicycle rental formula like 'OV-fiets' could achieve a market share up to 1% in the egress part of PT-travel. However, this would require substantial investments for creating storage capacity for thousands of extra bicycles. The capital costs of these investments are expected to take for more than any profit that would be expected from revenues, given the operational costs. But at a less ambitious level, a profitable exploitation of a formula like 'OV-fiets' should be possible within a limited number of years. (Author/publisher)
Abstract