A

The boom in smartphones and associated development in apps has seen an added boost for the bike sharing business. Bike sharing itself as a usable concept has been around since the mid-60s in Europe, but the relatively recent information technology explosion from the middle of the 2000s has made it a genuinely viable format that is more practical nowadays across the board.

B

The practicality of these bikes now provides the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle for many commuters, being cited as the way to solve ‘the last mile’ problem when connecting people from the public transport network to both home and the workplace. In addition, these programs appeal to tourists as well as local citizens. As one of China’s larger cities and a very popular tourist destination, Hangzhou was pro-active in creating what was at one time the largest bicycle sharing system in the world.

C

Community bike programs and smart bike programs alike can be seen, with the former being organised by locally community groups and/or non-profit groups, and the latter being implemented by government agencies often in partnership with private enterprises. The fundamental aim of these systems is to provide affordable access to bicycles for short-distance trips in cities and towns as an alternative option to vehicle public transport or private cars, thus easing traffic jams and congestion, noise pollution, and nasty emissions.

D

Theft of one’s own personal bike is a primary concern for most users who have switched over from riding their own bike to the shared bikes on offer. In addition, vandalism and damage, concerns regarding upkeep, safe storage and safe  parking are contributing worrying factors for the common cyclist. Other driving factors are of course primarily economic, time-saving, health / fitness, and the ever looming environmental reasons.

E

Government funding, charitable sources and advertising are the three commonly used methods to support community bike sharing projects as they are mostly unable to fund and support themselves using the available revenues of membership subscription and other user. There are  various ways to implement these schemes based on one or more options. These include being unregulated whereby bikes are released into a given area for  use by anyone. That given area could be a city or more typically an enclosed organisation such as a large company site or a university campus. The massive disadvantage here is that the bikes are often simply not available and the loss rate of the bicycles is very high owing to a lack of locks, security and user identification. A deposit-based system releases the bikes from a designated terminal and that deposit can only be retrieved by returning the bike to another official terminal. Again, loss of bikes is a serious issue as the deposit to cost of bike ration is unbalanced and so does not deter bike theft.

F

The membership structured approach has shown to be more effective, and the key within the system here is the member must register their authorised identity and a valid credit card to be allowed to have access to the bikes. If the bike is not returned within the subscription period, or returned with significant damage, the bike sharing operator withdraws  money from the user’s credit card account. A  system has been developed whereby a member need not return the bike to a kiosk; rather, the next user can find it by GPS.

G

Bike-sharing systems have undergone a plethora of changes which can be categorised into three key phases, or generations. These include the first generation, called white bikes (or free bikes); the second generation of coin-deposit systems; and the third generation, or information technology (IT) based systems. The technological and operational improvements of recent years are also paving the way for a probable fourth generation, known as the demand-responsive, multimodal system. E-bikes are the proposed next benefactor of a potential fifth generation as both software and hardware technologies continue to advance.

H

The popularity of these schemes comes with a price. In March 2017, for example, Beijing saw well over 200,000 bikes entering service. The bikes are accessible via an app, and cost 1 RMB per hour plus a refundable damage deposit of a few hundred RMB. In April 2017, the government in Beijing is requesting a temporary ban on the introduction of new shared bikes as serious issues with the sheer volume of bikes on the streets, bikes in parking stations and bikes left scattered around the city is becoming an issue to resolve in itself.

A PIPE DREAM

A.

“Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.” is the most famous line from Samuel T. Coleridge’s 18th century poem, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and these words could not be truer today. It is said that in the future, wars will not be fought over oil and gas, but water, that vital substance that makes up 70% of our bodies.

B.

According to the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, 97% of the world’s water is saltwater or ‘brackish’ water. Of the 3% remaining, 99% is “in inaccessible polar ice caps, glaciers or deep aquifers”, leaving only 0.03% of all the water on earth accessible and fresh. Water is such an important base for all Earth’s ecosystems that when we look for life on other planets, the main indicator we look for is water. We cannot imagine a life form that exists without it, yet there are millions of people today suffering from a severe lack of fresh water.

C.

Professor Rod Tennyson of the University of Toronto in Canada has a proposal that may change the fate of millions in the heart of one of the world’s driest areas: the Sahel region of Africa.

D.

The idea is literally a pipe dream. A dream of constructing a water pipeline called the Trans African Pipeline (TAP), which would run 8,800km (5,500 miles) across the northern part of the Sahel desert, running east to west across the entire African continent to provide water for more than 28 million people. Linking 12 countries together, there would be two large desalination stations set up on each coast, one in Djibouti and the other in Mauritania that would pump desalinated water across the dry continent. Along the way, the pipeline would serve Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali.

E.

Along the pipeline would run solar panels to create renewable energy and sustainable power to drive the desalination plants, pumping stations and irrigation systems. The water would be a vital source of life for the communities along the way, with more than half of the water to be used in creating local farming oases.

F.

The entire project is estimated to cost US$20.1 billion, which seems like a lot until you consider how many people could be saved, how many lives could be changed and how much could grow in the future. For example, it is estimated that in the Sahel region, more than 18 million people –including 1 million children — are directly at risk for food and water shortages this year. Eight million already require emergency assistance, according to Oxfam.

G.

Tennyson, along with his wife, journalist Daphne Lavers, first came up with the TAP project while watching BBC coverage of the G8 summit and the rallies and concerts  that were taking place to push the leaders to fund projects in Africa. Many of  these projects funded the building of wells and distribution of food packages. At the time, Tennyson was involved in developing safety monitoring technologies for large-scale pipelines. “We developed and manufactured fiber optic sensing systems, and with the accumulated knowledge I had gathered about pipelines, it occurred to us that a water pipeline across Africa could solve the water problem for good, not these band-aid solutions,” Tennyson said.

H.

Thus, the TAP project was born. Tennyson and his wife wrote their first feasibility study report and presented their paper at the international Water for Africa conference held in Hull, Quebec, to the large number of African attendees, many of whom were engineers and government officials. Happily, he “found that the TAP concept was very well-received. There were the standard questions about how difficult it would be to carry this off in many of the African countries, but one African member came to see me with tears in his eyes, and said this was the best idea he had heard of, and as far as he was concerned, this was the most important concept to emerge from this conference. I was hooked on making TAP a reality!”

I.

The project is starting to gather a following. It has officially been incorporated as a not-for-profit in Canada and is made up of a team of professors of engineering and geography, lawyers, economists and agronomists from Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and China. The project is now moving quickly with a major benefactor on board to help promote awareness of the project and to  initiate a formal study. TAP is working on raising $1 million in start-up funds from a private investor and will be applying to the G8 countries to cover the costs as part of their money pledged toward aid.