When my husband and I visit his family in Taipei every year, we eat our way through the city’s famous night markets and ride off the calories on an incredible network of protected bike paths.
One of our favorite rides is from central Taipei to the coastal town Tamsui. It’s about 15 miles of uninterrupted biking on a dedicated path along the Keelung and Tamsui Rivers that end with views of the East China Sea.
We also love riding within Taipei, where you can travel long distances on dedicated paths along the banks of several rivers that wind through the city. It’s a pleasant and scenic ride without cars in sight.
Bike share stations are everywhere in Taipei. You can rent a YouBike for a quick last mile ride from a metro station or an all-day excursion to the coast. YouBikes are inexpensive and comfortable to ride.
YouBikes are not just in Taipei. You can take a local train to a neighboring town or a high speed train to the other end of Taiwan and hop on a YouBike.
The service was launched in Taipei in 2009 with only 11 stations and 500 bikes. Now there are 6,800 stations across Taiwan with more than 650 million rentals annually. This blog has more data.
Residents and tourists of all ages have embraced YouBikes and usage continues to grow. But biking wasn’t always popular in Taiwan. YouBike had a rocky start in 2009.
This blog explains the history: “The project got off to a slow start, partly because coverage was limited ‒ only 500 bicycles were provided, rendering YouBikes hard to find and return – and partly because the cost of rental was not competitive compared with other modes of public transport. City residents also complained that it was too complicated to rent a YouBike. Moreover, even where it was possible, at the outset, before proper infrastructure was in place, cyclists often had to share bike lanes with scooters and other motorised vehicles, leading to concerns about safety.”
A focus on making the bikes convenient to use, plentiful to find, and affordable — coupled with creating safe paths to ride — led to a huge increase in the adoption of cycling as an accepted way to travel. Now the bikes are ubiquitous throughout Taipei and other cities in Taiwan. This is a lesson San Francisco can follow.
Love for YouBike in Taiwan inspires bloggers from around the world to wax poetic about the system.
Even in parts of Taiwan that don’t have YouBike yet, bike paths are being constructed — especially along the scenic coast — to meet cycling demand. Lionel and I could take a train from Taipei to the coast and rent a bike in a shop near the train station by the hour or day.
A popular ride for hometown and international tourists is a century-old train tunnel near the eastern coast that was repurposed into a bikeway. The Old Caoling Tunnel is nearly 1.5 miles long, which makes for a unique bike ride before reaching natural light again. Lionel and I brought his nephew and niece along for the fun and dramatic ride.
After exiting the long, dark tunnel you are treated to the bright sun on the eastern coast of Taiwan.
For city biking in Taipei, most of the pedestrian stairs include side ramps to easily walk your bike up and down. This makes it convenient to get your bike over urban obstacles to continue on a bike path.
Our biking adventures also included this tunnel of trees near Hsinchu City.
All that biking made us hungry for more night market dumplings.
The Raohe Night Market in Taipei inspired the successful Sunset Night Market. Now we have night markets all over San Francisco. Let’s also be inspired by Taipei’s commitment to accessible and safe biking.
Great cities have wonderful parks. They’re also walkable and rideable to and from those parks. Great cities build housing for all. They’re also home to protected bike lanes and safe passage for pedestrians.
San Francisco will only realize its full potential if we do bold and positive things like create Sunset Dunes, build the housing our kids and grandkids will need to stay here, and commit to making it easy to cycle everywhere.
Let’s be a truly great city, San Francisco!
Joel Engardio is an urbanist and a former city supervisor in San Francisco.
