Taipei’s bicycle rental system YouBike could see its 20 millionth rider next month, the Taipei City Government said, adding that reaching that mark would be a huge leap for the public bike scheme, as it only hit the 10-million-user mark in November last year.
The Taipei Department of Transportation, which manages the system, attributed the exponential growth in YouBike usage to an increase in the numbers of rental stations and bicycles.
“Ridership has at least tripled so far this year, compared with the same period last year,” transportation official Liu Chia-yu (劉嘉佑) said.
When the 10-million-rider milestone was reached, there were 4,165 bikes available at 124 rental stations across the capital.
Since then, those figures have increased to 5,235 bicycles and 159 stations, city government data showed.
Liu said the network draws more than 50,000 users each day, adding that accompanying the increase in usage rates has been a rise in service quality resulting from the introduction of a progressive pricing system on Oct. 1 last year to discourage people from taking the bikes for extended periods of time, thereby boosting availability.
Originally, YouBike’s 1.6 million registered users could rent the bikes for free for the first half hour and pay NT$10 for every subsequent 30 minutes.
Under the new pricing scheme, the fee is still NT$10 per half hour for the first four hours of rental, but it then rises to NT$20 before jumping to NT$30 for every 30 minutes after eight hours. As before, the first half hour of each ride is free.
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