For two weeks now Montréalers have experienced BIXI bike-sharing. Here are some of the first statistics:
- There about 2250 subscribers to the system.
- Through May 28, 738 bikes have been dispursed over 144 stations with a ratio of about 2 racks per bike.
- Almost 26,900 trips have been taken on BIXI of which 11,000 have been non-subscription casual users (or about 2.2 trips per bike per day). This is higher than the smaller Washington, D.C. system which earns around 1.5 trips per bike per day, but less than 7 trips per bike per day in the Lyon and Paris systems.
There have been a few growing pains as the system strides to its goal of 3,000 bikes with 300 stations in the central core of Montréal by June 7. During the first days, the National Post reports that bikes were locked in place because of erroneous or mischievious "repair required" indications. Comments of difficulty in taking a bike more than once on a day pass were expressed on the blog spacingmontréal, which showed that more explanation is sometimes needed.
To solve the confusion of the day membership, BIXI made this video:
The Bike-sharing Blog hopes to keep you up to date on the BIXI experiment.
Photo: The Chonicle
Video: BIXI
Statistic Public Bike Systems
4 comments:
any tips for intoducing bike sharing to my community?
Leslie,
I would recommend writing to your local elected officials and transportation department to ask that they consider implementing a bike-sharing program to complement existing transit. If you have a bicycle and transit advisory committee, work with them as partners when making this request to add more valence to your request.
Paul
Montreal have announced Today they will go phase II right now instead of next year passsing from 3 000 to 5 000 bikes making it the second largest system in the world after Paris. Not bad for a system that have been offer to public for only two months.
Today Bixi acknowledged that they knew that people would be taking bikes from many stations and not returning them to the area where originally taken from.
If they knew about this why did they not compensate? Paris learned that people do not like cycling up hills, and from the Plateau, etc it is downhill to centre ville.
So much for Bixi's claim of getting people exercising.
And then when people get downtown they find that vandals have made it impossible to return the bikes, in many cases. One would think that Montreal would have at least had the foresight to make the receptacles "bombproof" before putting them on our streets.
Its a good thing that these people only run Montreal.
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