Friday, April 6, 2012

The Bike-sharing World: First Week of April 2012

Europe:
   
     Slovakia



The City of Bratislava is looking for bids for bike-share. A tender offer is asking for submissions by April 27, 2012. The Bratislava Automated Bike System offer calls for at least an 11-station system as a start. What, you don't read Slovak? Here is an English synopsis and article about the tender. More and more cities in Eastern Europe are realizing the benefits of bike-sharing. A quick look at the Bike-sharing World Map sees the growth of new systems there.


    Poland


OsedomRad is one of the first bike-share systems that offers pick-up and drop-off stations in two counties! This 500-bike, 60-station system operated by neXtbike is based in and around the recreational areas of the Isle of Osedom in northeast Germany, close to the Poland border. A bike checked out from a station in Ahlbeck, Germany can be returned in Świnoujście, Poland and visa-versa! This is just another example of cooperation in the bike-share world that brings us a step closer to inter-operability.


Warsaw Public Bicycle which is scheduled to begin in June 2012 is operating in the Bemowo District of the city. Ten stations are reporting activity on a system map. According to a report in Eltis, it is the first District of many to have a program in the 
Polish capital.





This month NeXtbike Poland is to complement its 140-bike, 17-station Wroclaw City Bike program with a similar system in Pozan. It will open with 80 bikes in 7 stations on April 15th. We will watch as the Warsaw program expands this summer.


    The Netherlands


CallLock in Middelburg, near Belgium and the North Sea, began as a free pilot in November 2010. The system has 40 bikes in 6 stations. This year the system is to become a full fledged subscription payment operation.
                                               

 

CallLock currently operates mostly closed, employee-use only systems in Northern Europe.


China:


     Zhuzhou

                              


Once again phenomenal usage numbers are being reported out of China. The City of Zhuzhou, Hunan Province is reporting in the Rednet News an average of 150,000 daily trips on its 13,000 bikes! That's 11.5 trips/bike/day.


The system, not even a year old, had a single day with 200,000 trips. Beginning with about 10,000 bikes in 500 stations in September, this system is expected to expand to 20,000 bikes in 1,005 stations very shortly. We hope New York will match those numbers!



image: Slovakia TNT, Warsaw by Natalia Palkowska, Zhuzhou


Russell Meddin    bikesharephiladelphia.org

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm curious to know where the information came from that nextbike runs the UsedomRad. On the UsedomRad website I don't find anything about nextbike and on the nextbike website I don't see Usedom on their map. Perhaps nextbike was running UsedomRad in 2012 and this is no longer the case (since I'm year late reading this post). Also UsedomRad is expanding for 2013, in case you guys do a report for the start of the 2013 season and are looking for stories. They're adding at least three new stations in Greifswald, though the locations of other potential new stations aren't listed on their news page.