Every morning, Indira D unlocks a bright green bicycle from her residence in Rabindranath Tagore Nagar in Mysuru, Karnataka and travels around 5 kilometres to Manasagangotri campus of the University of Mysore, where she is a postgraduate student. Around a year ago, this daily commute was a routine of waiting for buses or hailing autos, an exercise never quite predictable for her. But in 2024, she made a simple switch. “I decided to try the public bicycle sharing (PBS) system,” she said. “For the first few weeks, I renewed my membership daily and then I got a monthly pass.”Trin Trin, Mysuru’s public bicycle sharing system, was launched in 2017 to provide an alternative and green mode of transportation for city commuters. Reckoned to be India’s first public bicycle sharing system, the project was planned and implemented by the Directorate of Urban Land Transport (DULT) of the Karnataka government and Mysore City Corporation (MCC) with an objective to offer an eco-friendly first and last mile connectivity. Currently, there are 48 docking hubs and a total of 500 bicycles, largely concentrated around educational institutions, tourist areas, and the central part of the city. Commuters can opt for the bicycle through a mobile application, on an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis -- Rs 30 for the first hour with Rs 10 added for every extra hour, Rs 99 for a full day, Rs 499 for seven days, and Rs 1,699 for a monthly pass, with further concessions to encourage adoption.Indira has a monthly pass and she keeps the bicycle overnight, riding it each morning and then docking it at one of the campus hubs before heading to class. .How India moves: Tunnel vision in Bengaluru’s urban planning is failing its commuters.The bicycles have become a noticeable option for tourists too. Anurag Tripathi and Om Prakash Panda, who are visiting the city from Bhubaneswar, say that in the last three days during their time in the city, they have skipped taking any Uber / Ola taxis or autos and have cycled extensively instead. “We covered around 13 km on these cycles today. From a mobility point of view, it is good. The product itself (the cycles) is well-designed and the concept has strong potential,” said Tripathi. However, their experience is hampered by infrastructure issues and app-related problems like glitches, issues with Bluetooth connectivity and difficulties in unlocking or ending rides.“The app is a nightmare. I forgot the docking hub yesterday and was looking at the wrong place for the cycle for a long time. All cycles look the same and the user cannot track a cycle through location. In the app, the location is provided for the user and not the cycle,” said Panda. The system, while functional on a basic level, also needs significant improvements in infrastructure to make it a truly tourist-friendly and smart urban mobility solution. “There are no dedicated cycle tracks and we always have to be careful and wait for the other vehicles to pass,” said Tripathi.Infrastructure woesOn June 5, when Down To Earth met Chethana S N and Manjunatha Gowda at the city corporation office, the two were busy monitoring the daily progress on a dashboard. Out of the total 500 bicycles, 255 have been ridden on the city’s roads till 1:30 pm, with commuters covering a total distance of 256 km on them. “The monthly average is around 33,462 total rides covering 15,640 km,” informed Gowda, who is the assistant engineer at the Mysuru City Corporation. He added that total lifetime users of the bicycles stand at 15,303 and around 17,000 people have registered on the application till date. Mysuru’s wide roads may seem perfect for cycle infrastructure, but on-ground implementation tells a different story. The project was launched in 2017 with 500 cycles and the number hasn’t increased since then. In the eight years since launch, uptake still remains much lower than the corporation had expected. “Mostly students and tourists use the cycles for now. Office going residents or locals are using less; they are travelling by their own vehicles,” said Chethana SN, development officer zone 1, Mysuru City Corporation. .While there are several reasons for the underwhelming response from the public, one of the major reasons is that the city still lacks the cycle infrastructure needed to encourage people to shift from personal or motorised vehicles. An existing 8.7-kilometre cycling track in the city failed to work efficiently after the retro reflective bollards were damaged. “After the laying of the track, street vendors started removing bollards that outline the path for cyclists by defining the cycle lanes. This happened in several places like Vishwa Manava Double Road. The street vendors dismantled the bollards to create parking spots for their customers,” said Gowda. The original plan was to extend the track but currently it lies unutilised and is in fact now used by people to park their two-wheelers. According to a 2021 report by German Development Agency GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) as a part of ‘Integrated Sustainable Urban Transport Systems for Smart Cities’ project implemented by it along with the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA), Mysuru has four bicycles per sq km under PBS. The length of cycle lane per sq km, which represents the density of bicycle network in a city, is influenced by presence of cycle lanes. Further, the level of market penetration of cycles was also low as the number of bicycles per thousand population was just 0.5, with just two trips per cycle per day. Cities with higher market penetration achieve higher trips per cycle per day. The number of bicycles per square kilometre represents the spatial distribution and level of access to the service, according to the report. Contrast this with some of the other cities in the world where bicycles are one of the major modes of transportation: Copenhagen has 53 bicycles per sq km, followed by Antwerp with 20, New York with 15 and London with 7.3. Similarly, Copenhagen and Antwerp have 6.5 and 8.1 bicycles per 1,000 population and achieve 7 and 5.6 trips per cycle per day, respectively, under PBS. .How India moves: Trichy moves to reduce air pollution, but lacks pedestrian, cycling infrastructure.But it is not just cycling infrastructure that Mysuru struggles with. The city’s public transport is also riddled with issues. Mysuru has a total of 438 diesel running buses. While plans are afoot to add 160 electric buses to the fleet, under the PM e-Bus Sewa scheme, with the city’s expanding population, especially after the inauguration of Bengaluru-Mysuru expressway in 2023, this fleet might fall short. “The frequency is poor and even the routes are a problem,” a commuter said. However, her major issue is that bus drivers don’t stop at the bus stop if they see college students and women. “This is due to the free bus ride scheme of the Karnataka government. There have been instances when I have been waiting for a bus for an hour and it did not stop at the bus stop where I was standing but went a few meters ahead to avoid picking me up,” she said, adding she has to run really fast to catch the bus in these cases. For now, Mysuru as a city, is able to meet its public transport requirement and last mile connectivity is good because of autos and bikes, “but is it sustainable; the answer is no,” said Mysuru City Corporation Commissioner Shaikh Tanveer Asif. While public transport faces challenges, Mysuru’s growing number of private vehicles, especially cars, poses a serious challenge to sustainable urban mobility. “The number of people wanting to stay in the city and the number of houses has increased, especially after the expressway,” he said. Mysuru's 2025 population is estimated at 1,345,720, according to the United Nation’s World Population Review. In 1950, the population was 236,572. In the last year, Mysuru has grown by 29,260, representing a 2.22 per cent annual change. As of June 25, the city has 1.3 million personal vehicles on the road, out of which the maximum share is of two-wheelers (motorcycles and scooters), according to the Union government’s Vahan dashboard. .“The carbon emissions in the city are increasing and we want to push people towards greener mobility options. Mysuru has broad roads and broad circles. So the public bicycle sharing project is something we can push. But there is no culture of using cycles in any Indian city, including Mysuru. In developed countries like Netherlands, France, Germany, high-income groups have moved from automobiles to cycles because of health concerns,” Asif said. “In India, the natural push is not there because we see driving a car as status symbol and riding a bicycle as a symbol of poverty. Everybody wants to move up that ladder. So, there is a need to delink car use and public transport from status and income. That being the case, we want to push it so that people, after a point, themselves want to ride a bicycle, and it becomes a peoples’ movement.”Acknowledging that the cycle infrastructure has to first come up, he informed that work is underway, in collaboration with GIZ, to build a continuous cycle path from Chamundi Hills to the city centre. “This includes footpath extensions and protective bollards. The aim is that the heart of the city is supported by cycle infrastructure and number of cycles can increase. A detailed project report is in progress,” Asif said. Chetana added that this time the planning will be better and the street vendors will be rehabilitated in another location before track building starts. Meanwhile, Trin Trin phase 2 will also be coming soon, with 500 more bicycles, taking the total number to 1,000. Also, 52 hubs will be added to the current 48, taking the total number of hubs to 100. This article is part of our series on how India moves, which looks at the relationship between air quality and human mobility in cities and towns.