Hello, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Coming up, urban bike sharing schemes.

They're here, they're everywhere. A revolution in city transport, their providers claim,

except even they admit the odd problem. At one point in time, we were losing up to 10% of our bikes per month.

And of course, any business that does that, you know, can't really continue.

So we had to make the very tough decision to withdraw.

We find out why bike sharing failed in one British city and we ask if there are limits to this bright promised future.

It's how you set up a bike share scheme in a city.

Cities will not tolerate almost flooding of bikes into the streets.

All that coming up in Business Daily from the BBC.

I'm out on the streets now of central London.

I normally ride a bike in London, but today I'm doing something slightly

different. I am renting a Mo bike. It's a kind of bicycle owned by a Chinese company and it sits

in front of me. It's rather a, I have to say, a pretty heavy beast. It's got rather a low saddle

for a tall man like me, extremely heavy and orange. I think that's about as much as I can say about

it. It's one of a handful of bike sharing companies that now operate in London. In fact, regular

Biz Daily listeners will remember I wrote something similar in China a few months ago where dockless

bike sharing has really taken off. There are no docking stations for Mo Bikes. You just find one on the street

with an app on your phone. You unlock it. It makes this sound. And then you can ride it off or

abandon it if you've had enough of it when you're done. Mo Bike and a Chinese rival called

Offo have got big money backers now popping up in cities all around the world.

That's our theme in today's program.

And bike sharing is being touted as the future of urban transport.

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