Yellow Bike Luggage Racks Are Like Uber for Bicycling

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That's not precisely what the Yellow Backie program is, but that's my takeaway from this interesting development from Amsterdam.

With half a million cyclists, Amsterdam is the bicycling capital of Europe. If you've lived in Amsterdam for a while, that's great. But if you're a visitor, then navigating the city by bike can be confusing. So Yellow Bike, a bike rental company, invites people to stop by one of its locations and get a free yellow luggage rack. When you ride around town with one of these, you're inviting people to hitch a ride by sitting on the rack.

Yellow Bike says "It's a bit like couchsurfing--on a bike!" Right now, rides are free. But as some economists have pointed out, the boon of Uber is that it lets people turn their consumer goods into capital goods--their personal possessions into ways of earning money. Perhaps these yellow luggage racks are the beginning of a way for bicyclists to do precisely that.

-via The Presurfer