YouBike Public Bike-Share

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below · 🔎 Last verified 2026-08-11

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means

Taipei and Giant Bicycles launched YouBike in March 2009 as an 11-station, 500-bike pilot in Xinyi District. The city expanded it citywide by 2014, then relaunched it as YouBike 2.0 in May 2021 with QR/EasyCard smartphone rental, single-slot docking and GPS-tracked bikes. About 1,300 stations and 15,000 bikes operate under a city-commissioned Build-Operate-Transfer contract (Sept 2025).

Live 📅 since 2009

Outcome🔄 Ongoing

Evidence🏛️ Official

what does this mean?

The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →

Run byYouBike Co. (Giant Bicycles subsidiary), under a Build-Operate-Transfer contract with the Taipei City Department of Transportation

Scale🏙️ City-wide

📊 Impact

Daily rentals rose 53% to roughly 200,000 after Taipei made the first 30 minutes free from 28 Feb 2024 (NT$370 million annual budget). Cumulative rides passed 399.8 million by August 2025. Rising sidewalk conflicts with pedestrians led Taipei, New Taipei and Taoyuan to adopt a shared penalty-point system from July 2024: one point for riding on covered sidewalks or not yielding, three points a 14-day suspension, seven a one-year ban.

🎓 Lesson

A city-funded, dock-based bike-share with a generous subsidy scales ridership fast — but growth on shared sidewalks creates a pedestrian-safety cost that shows up years after launch, not at it.

🚲 Mobility Cycling Shared mobility Sensors & IoT

Sources

↗ EBRD Green Cities — Taipei Bike-Sharing System (YouBike)2009 pilot budget, BOT structure, 2014 citywide expansion, 2018 ridership/survey data.

↗ Taipei Department of Transportation — YouBike IntroductionOfficial current station/bike counts, updated 17 Sept 2025; operator/BOT confirmation.

↗ Taipei Times — Taipei launches upgraded YouBike systemYouBike 2.0 launch date (9 May 2021) and technical changes.

↗ Taipei Times — Taipei offering free YouBike rides for first 30 minutesFree-30-minutes policy start date and NT$370 million budget.

↗ Taipei Times — YouBike expecting 400 millionth rideCumulative rides and daily-ridership growth as of Aug 2025.

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↗ Taiwan News — YouBike demerit system begins in northern TaiwanSidewalk-riding penalty-point system, July 2024.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇹🇼 EasyCard (悠遊卡) Contactless Fare Card · Taipei EasyCard has unlocked a YouBike as easily as an MRT gate since the bike-share system's 2009 launch. 🇹🇼 TPASS Flat-Fare Transit Pass (Greater Taipei) · Taipei YouBike rides are folded into TPASS's flat NT$1,200 monthly pass alongside MRT, buses and rail, since July 2023. 🇰🇷 Ttareungyi Public Bike-Share · Seoul Seoul's Ttareungyi (2015) and Taipei's YouBike (2009) both began as small city-funded pilots before scaling citywide.

Explore the wider context

🚦 Asphalt or algorithms 🚲 Cycling guide 🏙️ Taipei city profile 🚲 Mobility projects 📖 Geofencing 📖 15-minute city 📖 Adaptive traffic signals

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “YouBike Public Bike-Share” — Taipei, Taiwan. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/taipei-youbike-bikeshare/ (last verified 2026-08-11). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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