Short answers, pulled from the story.
Bicycle-sharing systems originated in Amsterdam in the summer of 1965, when Luud Schimmelpennink and the Provo movement painted fifty bicycles white and placed them around the city for free public use. The police confiscated all of them within a day. Schimmelpennink later admitted no more than about ten bikes were ever actually put on the street.
By 2022, bike share schemes were offered in approximately 3,000 cities worldwide, including Dubai, New York, Paris, Mexico City, Montreal, and Barcelona.
Bike-sharing systems are grouped into five generations: staffed stations (zero generation), free or white-bike programs (first generation), coin-deposit stations like Copenhagen's Bycyklen (second generation), automated docking stations with smart cards (third generation), and dockless GPS-tracked bikes like Deutsche Bahn's Call a Bike (fourth generation).
In 2018, oversupply and inadequate regulation caused a collapse of dockless bike sharing in China. Companies introduced millions of shared bikes ahead of proper urban planning and user education. Riders parked bicycles illegally, cities were forced to impound them, and millions went to junkyards after the companies that owned them went bankrupt.
In the United States, bike-sharing trips are estimated to result in an annual reduction of 4.7 premature deaths and 36 million dollars in health economic impacts, mostly from increased physical activity. A European study covering 12 major cities found bike share schemes were making a measurable impact on health costs.
Montreal launched BIXI in 2009 and created the Public Bike System Company to sell the underlying infrastructure to other cities. Washington D.C.'s Capital Bikeshare launched in 2010 and New York City's Citi Bike launched in 2013 using that infrastructure. The Public Bike System Company was privatised in 2014 and later acquired by Lyft in 2022.