Some cities have begun putting bicycles at the disposal of their citizens. With previous registration and for a fee of 30,- EUR per year (in the case of Barcelona,"bicing"; "Sevici" in Sevilla), you can hire a bicycle at bicycle parking areas (docking stations) around the city with a user card, use it for 30 minutes at a time, and then leave it at the same or another parking area. The time limit makes it a convenient means of transport for point-to-point rides and prevents the system from putting commercial bicycle rentals out of business. With bicycles available all over the city you do not need to buy, store, and maintain your own bicycle. Problems in the case of Barcelona are that the system shuts down at night at the same time as the subway, and that often downtown in the morning you do not find a parking space, and in the afternoon you do not find a bicycle as everybody wants to go in the same direction at the same time. Another general problem of traffic in Barcelona is that there is too little space and very few, often inconveniently placed bicycle lanes. Apart from the user fees, the systems are paid for with licenses for the commercial exploitation of bus-stop (and other) billboards (by the likes of JCDecaux) and publicity on the bicycles (as you can see in the picture).
Thanks to an old article in The Economist (September 22, 2007) I learned that the great competitors for urban bike-operations were JCDecaux and Clear Channel Outdoor, and that at that time there were already rental schemes in place "in more than a dozen cities including Vienna, Lyon, Brussels, Seville ... Cordoba... Barcelona, Oslo, Stockholm and Rennes." Bologna also has them.
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