Hi! We've set up a free bike rental outfit here in Wellington nz, and are starting another one down in Invercargill. It's been a fun spin off of Mechanical Tempest, our bike collective. We've got a fleet of about 8 bikes, that anyone can rent for a week (up to a month if you really want), that comes with a helmet, lights and a combo lock (that also has a key that we keep just in case).
We did a lightweight crowdfunding campaign to raise about a grand - https://www.pledgeme.co.nz/projects/1688.
Here's the Wellington Wünderbike site http://wunderbike.blogspot.co.nz/ (which I'd like to redo at some point)
Here's the code of honour http://wunderbike.blogspot.co.nz/p/membership_26.html that potential members agree to.
The membership form http://wunderbike.blogspot.co.nz/p/membership-form.html
I've also made a little open source app https://github.com/jdoud/wunderbike-rails for tracking rental status of the bikes (so we can check and see if a bike is available without going down to where we store them). Here's an example of it http://frozen-chamber-7656.herokuapp.com/rentals, and here's the code https://github.com/jdoud/wunderbike-rails. I'd love to build more features into it at some stage for member authentication, uploading pictures and descriptions of the bikes and a calendar system where people could reserve the bikes.
It's been a great experience that has support of local council. Good luck and let me know if we can help at all!
Cheers, Jesse