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The bike industry has gained a rapidly growing market for its products. It is with government-financed rental bikes. After a slow start this new category really took off with the introduction of the Vélib rental bike in Paris in July 2007. Other cities are following suit or have already put public bike hire system in place.

The number of bikes per project is huge: Paris 20,000, Rome 10,000 and London also announced its start with 6,000. All this has a huge impact on the transmission systems for bikes.

It goes without saying that all these public bikes for hire are making use of the transmission systems that are fool-proof; that can hardly be damaged by vandalism. That leaves only one option and that is by equipping these bikes with bottom bracket cartridges in combination with gear hubs.

The Vélib bike scheme in Paris was responsible for what had almost every Capital in the world contemplating about public bike hire schemes. Since July 2007 Paris was all of a sudden the world capital of rental bikes. Once again the bicycle was in the spotlight as the healthy, zero-emission alternative for the traffic congestion most big cities are struggling with.

The first statistics show the success of the Vélib in Paris: every bike is being rented on average ten times a day and around 300,000 people, mainly Parisians, have already taken annual subscriptions.

More successors to the Paris rental system are on the way. Pictured here is the Barcelona Bicing System which is already partly in operation. By summer this year 6,000 bikes are planned to be made available.

And there’s more to come as a growing number of cities are setting up self-service rental bike schemes. Chicago is interested, as well as Moscow, Washington, Geneva, Roma, Beijing and Sydney. With the fight against climate change to continue, and even to be accelerated in the near future, the biggest cities in the world will discover bicycles. This is also having a huge effect on the sales for bicycles around the world.

The offering in bikes will change drastically. That offering is now dominated by sports orientated bikes like MTBs and road racers. With the biggest cities in the world implementing rental bike schemes; the demand for City, Trekking and folding bikes is growing and with that also the demand for hassle-free transmission systems like bottom bracket cartridges in combination with gear hubs.