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Witness History

The First Bicycle Sharing Scheme

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.41.6K Ratings

🗓️ 28 May 2018

⏱️ 9 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the mid 1960s a Dutch engineer called Luud Schimmelpennink came up with a scheme to share bikes, and cut pollution. He collected about ten old bicycles, painted them white and left them at different points around Amsterdam. Luud has been speaking to Janet Ball about why that first scheme didn't last, and how he went on to invent an early computerised car-sharing scheme as well.

Photo: Activists with one of the original white bikes from the first scheme. Credit: Luud Schimmelpennink.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless

0:06.8

searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the

0:11.8

telly we share what we've been watching

0:14.0

Cladie Aide.

0:16.0

Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.

0:19.0

Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.

0:21.0

And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less

0:24.9

searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC sounds you're listening to the

0:30.6

witness podcast from the BBC World Service with me Janet Ball.

0:35.0

Schemes for sharing bikes and cars are now a normal part of city life across the globe.

0:40.0

But the first bike sharing scheme was developed more than 50 years ago in Amsterdam.

0:46.0

Lack of technology and political will meant it didn't last long.

0:50.0

I spoke to the man who came up with the idea lewd shimmel pennies.

0:57.0

In 1965 the Dutch Provo Movement was formed in Amsterdam.

1:02.0

It was a playful anarchist group which used

1:05.5

nonviolent but theatrical protests to bait the police and push its

1:10.3

anti-establishment, anti-royal, anti-consumer agenda.

1:15.0

One of its members, 30-year-old industrial engineer Lude Schimelpenock, was determined to find a solution

1:21.2

to Amsterdam's rising traffic congestion and pollution levels.

1:25.0

The 60s is still a point that things were changing.

1:30.0

It was in the same time that things like this happened.

1:33.4

The provos published a magazine and in one of their first editions Lood announced a revolutionary

...

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