You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (December 2011) Click for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the German article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 9,120 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at :de:Fahrradverleih; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Fahrradverleih}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

A bike rental or bike hire business rents out bicycles for short periods of time, usually for a few hours. Most rentals are provided by bike shops as a sideline to their main businesses of sales and service, but shops specialize in rentals.

As with car rental, bicycle rental shops primarily serve people who do not have access to a vehicle, typically travellers and particularly embers and others charge a monthly or yearly fee. Most such systems allow a member to sign out a bike from any station for up to half an hour of free use, enough for most commuters to travel to their destination where they can drop the bike at any station bike sharing start after the first free half hour in order to encourage the user to return the bicycle at the end of each trip, and take another bicycle for the next trip.