Urban sustainable mobility is a main issue within contemporary cities. Within the emerging technologies of collaborative mobility, bike sharing schemes (BSS) are a rapidly growing transportation infrastructure implemented in cities world-wide. However, the scientific research on BSS remains a patchwork of mostly technical and quantitative studies. Qualitative and critical research on the motives and the implementation process of bike sharing schemes is vastly underrepresented, whereas this study is looking at this missing part of the literature on bike sharing schemes.
This study investigates the motives of politicians, the city administration and other stakeholders to implement a bike sharing scheme owned by the public transport provider in the German city of Munich. Five main motive complexes were identified: 1) bike sharing schemes as public transport, 2) city image and marketing, 3) market research on inter- and multimodal mobility, 4) other benefits and 5) environmental and health benefits. These motives were discussed in regard to the synergies of public transport and BSS and the development of fourth generation BSS. In an additional analytical step a critical theoretical framework on bike sharing schemes was developed, drawing from insights of critical urban theory, urban political ecology and the framework of splintering urbanism. This was used for a critical discussion of bike sharing schemes as a conflict on the redistribution of urban space towards less impacting modes of transport and their nature as a (premium) mobility service.