BERLIN --Bicycles for rent could become as common as newspaper stands and mail boxes on Germany's street corners if a scheme launched by Deutsche Bahn is successful.

The German rail operator has launched a bicycle-hire scheme designed for simple one-way trips, rather than full-day hire, and believes it will succeed where schemes in other European cities have failed.

"It's a new concept," said Andreas Knie, head of the project for Deutsche Bahn.

In a bit of a rush? No cash for a taxi? Not inclined to run? Deutsche Bahn believes call a bike is the answer.

Users must first register with call a bike at a cost of 15 euros. With a simple phone call, they can hire a bike, many of which are parked outside stations, at a cost of three to five cents per minute. At the end of their journey, they ring a computer and tell it where the bike is parked.

"There'll be a bike on every street corner. You'll first need to register with us. Then you can make a call to free up a bike ... and later you leave it at any road junction. It's as simple as that," Knie said.

The bikes are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Deutsche Bahn already has 2,000 of its distinctive-looking bikes in Berlin and 1,000 in Munich where it began a pilot project last October. Bikes could start appearing in Hamburg and Cologne next year, with other cities to follow, Reuters reported.

Deutsche Bahn launched a car-sharing scheme along similar lines last December.

"In Munich, it's mainly been 20 to 30-year-olds who are hiring the bikes. About 80 percent are locals, but it's good for tourists too, even with the one-off payment," Knie said, adding that call a bike's computer also gives instructions in English.

In Munich, call a bike has 10,000 paid-up members and on sunny days and at weekends averages 600 trips a day, typically of an hour to an hour and a half. Knie says they are not competing with bike rental firms.

In Berlin, where the scheme began at the end of July, 2,100 people have signed up.

??????? Tough Transporters????? No one will be breaking speed records with call a bike bicycles. They weigh in at 25 kilograms (55 lb), at least double the weight of a normal bicycle, though they do have eight gears.

"They are pretty heavy, but we don't want people taking them on the train or into the subway," Knie said.

They are also designed with parts that do not fit a normal bicycle. Even the screws are irregular and the bike looks so odd that thieves would stand out.

Vandalism and theft have led to the downfall of previous schemes which date back to Amsterdam's 1966 "white bike" scheme.

In that short-lived experiment, anti-establishment groups painted bikes white and left them around the Dutch capital. The theory was anyone could pick them up for free and set them down after use.

However, many were taken permanently and repainted, while the police impounded others on the basis that ownerless bikes were street rubbish.

Amsterdam's transport authority tried to launch a pay-per-ride scheme in 2000, but vandals ripped the bikes out of their racks.

"We'd be losing seven to eight bikes per week," said Luud Schimmelpennink, behind the 1966 project and now chairman of a foundation trying to relaunch white bikes in Amsterdam. "You only need a few nutters to destroy the system."

Knie acknowledges that the German capital, with its history of anarchist riots such as those on May 1 every year, will be an acid test of the viability of the German system.

"It's a bigger, rougher city than Munich and we'd expect a few more problems," he said. So far 30 bikes of 2,000 have been damaged or gone missing.