On your bike, Bristol

Bristol is to become the UK's first "cycling city", with £23m of new investment to promote more bike use in the city - including a major on-street bike rental network, like the Velib scheme in Paris. This will happen as Bristol and its neighbouring authorities continue to consider a congestion scheme, along the same lines as Greater Manchester.

The Paris scheme is massive. Started almost a year ago, there are 1,500 bike racks dotted around the city - and over 20,000 bikes. Here's how it works...For one week, you pay a €5 subscription by credit card at your nearest rack. Your first half hour is free every time, the second half hour is €1, the third half hour is €3, and every other half hour is €4. Longer-term users pay a deposit of €150. Sounds like a complete bargain to me...Paris is now launching a green car-hire scheme, to provide electric cars that you can pick up and drop off anywhere in the city.

But Paris is a lot bigger than Bristol, so Bristol might be better learning from bike schemes in similar-sized cities like Munich. Its "Call a bike" scheme was initially started in 2000 - but it didn't work at first, because many of the registered users didn't actually use it. Re-introduced in 2001, alongside schemes in Berlin (2002), Frankfurt (2003) and Cologne, etc, "Call a bike" is now successful and profitable - with 1,100 bikes on offer in Munich alone. But it took a while for it to reach critical mass.

There are a couple of lessons for Bristol. First, it might want to adopt the simple booking system of "Call a bike" - rather than the expensive GPS technology in Paris, cyclists in Munich just call a security hotline when they rent a bike. Second, Bristol could team up with Bath, and run its scheme across the two cities, to attract more users. One problem, though - Bristol is very hilly!

Other UK cities will be following Bristol - including York, Cambridge and Blackpool. And last year, Ken Livingstone asked Transport for London to examine the feasibility of a bike hire scheme for London. Not sure where that's got to, but I'm sure Boris will be a fan.