The Bike-sharing World the Last Week of December 2015

The World:

As 2015 comes to an end, it is time to think about recapping the numbers for this year's achievements in public use bicycle cities around the world.

This animation shows the growth of the public use programs in the world since 1993 through 2015 and beyond. As this year closes, there have been around 120 new cities so far that have started bike-share systems. China leads the way with around 60 new cities, while the USA saw around 20 new cities join this movement.

Blue: New City - Grey: Terminated - Yellow: Planned
Using the data from The Bike-sharing World Map, a comprehensive look at 2015 will available on this blog in early January 2016.

Currently, there are around 980 cities that have automated, 3rd generation, information technology bicycle programs that allow 'A' to 'B' pick-up and drop-off. The total number of public use bicycles in operation throughout these cities is around 1,258,500. New this year is the inclusion of  'Pedelecs', electrical assist pedal bicycles, which comprises around 9,300 bicycles of this total. This subset has been growing extensively in the last year and will only continue to do so into 2016.

Liangzhuzhen, Hangzhou, China new Smart GPS Bicycle

Asia:
China

Hangzhou,

After years of utilizing fairly low grade bicycles in public services, many Chinese cities are finally upgrading them. The Hangzhou GST Development Company, the research and development arm of the Hangzhou Public Bicycle Program, has created a GPS enabled "smart bike" as part of the IBSplus system to be first deployed in Laingzhu, a town near Hangzhou.

The same company is also creating a single access and payment card called "ibicycle", which can be used to access all of the 147 services throughout China that utilize their equipment, according to the Kim Tong News Agency. Additionally, The Hangzhou GST Development Company is developing a mobile phone application they have named "icycle", which can be used to access, pay, and map the bicycle usage.

The other major Chinese company, Changzhou Wing Eversafe Public Bicycle Systems, has already issued a single access card to 44 of the 150 cities that use its equipment including the Russian city of Blagoveshchensk on the Chinese border.

Jincheng,

Jincheng, China Pedelecs

This month Jincheng, Shanxi added 3,000  
Pedelecs to its current 5,000 pedal bicycle service, making it the first and largest deployment of pedelecs not only in China, but in the world. Jincheng joins Barcelona and Milan with mixed pedal and pedelec bicycles in their fleets. With only a few days in operation, it is not known if the new pedelecs are being used as much as in these two other cities.                                                                                                                  

North America:
USA:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   
Birmingham,

ZYP Bikeshare

Directions on how to use ZYP

Speaking of mixed Pedelec and pedal services, ZYP Bikeshare has brought solar-powered electric assist bicycles to the deep South of the United States. Since its debut in October, around 2,800 members have ZYP'ed around town, making the service's name a verb to describe the experience. 


Around 25% of the current fleet of 300 bikes in 30 stations are pedelecs, which help the residents and visitors conquer the hills surrounding the Central Business District (CBD). This spring the service will grow to 100 pedelecs and 300 8-speed pedal bikes in 40 totally solar stations. All the bikes are 'smart GPS-enabled' and the illuminated kiosk can dispense a rechargeable card for those who are only occasional users. As with many services, the bikes can be accessed using a mobile phone application. 

ZYP'ing around the Birmingham's CBD is now "no sweat" with a little pedal assist!
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 
images: IBSplus Bike, Jincheng Pedelec, ZYP Bikeshare

Russell Meddin          bikesharephiladelphia.org

Keep in touch with The Bike-sharing World with The Bike-sharing World Map. It is the premiere resource for information on cities with Public Use Bicycle programs and the complement to The Bike-sharing Blog. Use this easy web address for viewing the map:  

www.bikesharingmap.com.

Follow the Map on Twitter@BikesharingMap                                                 

Happy 10th Anniversary, MetroBike!

MetroBike is pleased to be celebrating our 10^th anniversary this month.

After many years of publishing academic articles on bike-sharing while working on my master’s degree with the hope of someone else bringing bike-share to the shores of the U.S., I became impatient with the wait and knew I had to be the change I wished to see. So in November 2005, I left the safety of a municipal job with benefits to found MetroBike in order to foster bike-sharing’s introduction. MetroBike was the U.S.’s first bike-share consultancy. My parents thought I was crazy. Looking back, I guess I was.

With MetroBike I’ve had the opportunity to assist in founding Capital Bikeshare in the Washington, D.C. region where we serve in a managerial and planning role for two of the system’s municipal owners, having sited 132 of the service’s stations. I’ve enjoyed returning to Copenhagen – the city where I first learned about bike-sharing in 1995 – to help the region modernize the former coin-operated system that helped the world see what bike-share could be on a large-scale. There have been many other non-profit, for-profit, academic, and local and federal government clients over the years. Also, I’ve doubled the size of MetroBike from one to two people – a 100% increase!

While MetroBike isn’t a Fortune 500 company, it’s nice that a small business can help change the world. Thank you to MetroBike’s past and present clients and the folks who have believed in me to bring this crazy little idea of bike-share into their pocket of the world. Thanks also to the readers of The Bike-sharing Blog and The Bike-sharing World Map. It’s wonderful to be able to do something that I love in making bikes available to all for a cleaner and healthier planet. We’re looking forward to the next 10 successful years.

Sincerely,

Paul DeMaio

Founder and Principal

MetroBike, LLC

Washington, D.C., USA

The Bike-sharing World - Early Fall 2015

North America
USA

        Chicago Conferences

Swiss Designed Velobility SwissFleet Pedelec

The Shared Use Mobility Center (SUMC) and the North American Bikeshare Association (NABSA) joint conference had two very interesting Public Use Bicycling (PUB) products on display, both making their North American debut: The Velobility pedelec and the Blaze Safety Laserlight.

Velobility, a Swiss producer of bike systems in service in Europe and the Middle East, showed its new SwissFleet pedelec. One of the most intriguing aspects of this bicycle is it has multiple methods for re-charging its electrical-assist motor. Not only could it be recharged at its conventional powered docking station, but also using a soon-to-be adopted universal EnergyBus connector made for all electric vehicle rechargers which are planned to be widely available in many cities. This could be a game changer. This bike improves upon Velobility's RIDEBOX which the Blog wrote about previously. This feature has an electronic self-contained locking mechanism, the electric-assist motor, battery, and all the electronics. There is an on-bike user keypad interface with RFID, NFC, and smartphone connections for easy operation. More importantly, it's a nice riding bike for PUB service!

The Blaze Laserlight on a London Santander Cycle

The bright spot of the new products was definitely the Blaze Laserlight fitted on a PBSC Urban Solutions bicycle. After a year long process, the developers of Blaze working with Transport for London (TfL) and their operator, SERCO, adapted this safety laser light for use on 250 Santander Cycles in London as a trial. The laser light projects an image of a bicycle on the street 6 meters in front of the bicycle while it is in motion and at night. This makes both pedestrians, other cyclists, and motor vehicles take note of the oncoming cycle hire bicycle. All PUB systems should consider incorporating this device in their fleets.

Here is a video of the Blaze Laserlight:

Stay tuned for more updates, including a report on the recent launch of North America's first municipal pedelec program. Plus a sneak peek of the end of the year data from The Bike-sharing World Map.

If you didn't have a chance to make it to the Chicago Conference mentioned above, there is another event of great interest taking place next month at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts USA.

A Global Summit Investigating Sustainable Mobility Futures: November 11 -13, 2015 and The Disrupting Mobility Hackathon: November 6 -8, 2015   www.disrupting-mobility.org

Russell Meddin          bikesharephiladelphia.org

Keep in touch with The Bike-sharing World with The Bike-sharing World Map. It is the premiere resource for information on cities with Public Use Bicycle programs and the complement to The Bike-sharing Blog. Use this easy web address for viewing the map:  

www.bikesharingmap.com.

Follow the Map on Twitter@BikesharingMap

The Bike-sharing World - Last Week of August 2015

North America
USA
                      Fargo, North Dakota

Great Rides - Photo from the City of Fargo

The small Great Rides B-cycle program accomplished an amazing feat for a North American program this week. According to KRWK, with a mere 101 bikes in 11 stations, the program managed 1,850 rides in one day! 

One metric used to determine the success of a program is how many times, on average, each bike is used in one day. The term for this is 'trips per bike per day' or (TPBPD).
The highest TPBPD CitiBike in New York City claimed is around 11. The occidental world record has been held by DublinBikes in Dublin, Ireland which reported around 15 TPBPD. We won't talk about China, because there are a few cities that have consistently broken out of the teens with their TPBPD. 

Great Rides in Fargo North Dakota has a 18.5 TPBPD! Congratulations! 

Now to be fair, about a third of the Great Ride stations are on the campus of North Dakota State University. All students are eligible to enroll in the program at no charge. There is no fee for the first 30 minutes of each ride on campus or off. This greatly contributes to the program's success. Yes, it is a great ride!

September in Chicago

Move Together: National Shared Mobility Summit

Registration is now open! The 2015 Shared Mobility Summit Move Together will bring transportation and policy leaders from across the country to Chicago on September 28-30, 2015. This is a conference on Shared-Use Mobility and the annual meeting of the North American Bikeshare Association.

If you are interested in starting a Public Use Bicycle program or making one better, consider signing up for Move Together.


Russell Meddin          bikesharephiladelphia.org

Keep in touch with The Bike-sharing World with The Bike-sharing World Map. It is the premiere resource for information on cities with Public Use Bicycle programs and the complement to The Bike-sharing Blog. Use this easy web address for viewing the map:  

www.bikesharingmap.com.

Follow the Map on Twitter@BikesharingMap

International Bike-share Database

Hey bike-share system owners and operators, this post is for you!

It is said that something doesn’t matter unless it is counted. According to The Bike-sharing World Map, there are nearly 900 bike-share systems worldwide, yet how are the systems performing globally and how is your local system doing? How many trips are being made? How many people have used the service? How many kilometers or miles have the bikes been ridden?

Some bike-share systems make their anonymized ridership data publicly available either as large database files or through a more user-friendly “dashboard” as the Washington, D.C. Department of Transportation has done for Capital Bikeshare (image below). Many rail and bus transit systems have been doing this for much longer than bike-share systems. Now it's time for bike-share to step it up and do an even better job of reporting to show the contributions the industry is making and prove we are here for the long-term, rather than just being a decade-long fad. There is a grace period for infant systems, but as systems mature into adulthood, we need to be doing the same info sharing that other transit systems are providing. In fact, we should do better.

To document this data, the North American Bike-share Association and its members have created the International Bikeshare Database to collect and share important information about bike-share services in a user-friendly format for the benefit of its members and the general public. The Database has the goal of being the prime source for bike-share data for comparative purposes for those within the industry, for academic purposes to foster research in the nascent field, and anyone else who cares. Data about participating bike-share systems is provided with its latest fiscal year information, monthly trip and estimated distances, and a glossary of terms to assist the industry develop its vocabulary.

It's rare that a totally new form of transit comes into existence and since bike-share has done so, it needs to follow best practices in the greater transit industry and develop its own best practices within its subset of the transit industry. This is an opportunity to use some of the best practices that pre-existed bike-share and develop specific ones that apply only to us. Most of the folks I know who have come to this industry are coming with a bike background, rather than transit background. This is bringing in lots of new thinking into how to develop the industry. Having an industry-wide resource, such as The International Bike-share Database, is necessary. The Database is similar to the National Transit Database which is for U.S. transit systems, but does not include bike-share... yet.

The Database is starting off small, but hopefully will grow as the number of systems in North America grows and evolves.

The Unicorn Bike

 

The term "unicorn bike" came about to describe a marketing campaign for a North American bike-share service, likely Chicago in 2013. It was one bike that had a different color than the rest which made it stand out from the crowd and therefore drew attention to it. Unicorn bikes have been replicated in other services and makes a great marketing tool to generate interest in the system or for events such as D.C.'s Cherry Blossom Festival as shown in the tweet below.

@bikeshare the #bikeinbloom looked great in Southwest Thursday evening, home of the cherry blossoms! pic.twitter.com/Oevnxhd2Fu

— Sarah Young (@Arglefraster) April 10, 2015

With Montreal's season launch for 2015, they debuted a family of unicorn bikes. As unicorns aren't real, (or are they?), there isn't a proper term for a grouping of them like a gaggle of geese. I know this because I checked Wikipedia which knows all and is mostly kinda right some of the time. We'll call a grouping of unicorn bikes a "guffaw". You'll see what I mean in the photo below -- so much color, so much smiling and laughter.

Bixi had about 30 specially designed bikes which were a variety of solid colors with designs on the downtube, rack, and mudguard. The bikes are eye-catching and will surely turn heads as folks wonder, "Is that a Bixi?" and then realize the bike's shape is familiar, so it must be.

The "Bike In Bloom" that we use in D.C. during Cherry Blossom season has been very popular with the public with its associated contest which encourages customers to tweet a photo of the bike. A few of the lucky tweeters win prizes, including annual memberships and gifts donated by local businesses.

Does your city have a unicorn bike? Share it with us!

The Bike-sharing World - Special Video - Earth Day Week 2015

North America:
USA:
Philadelphia:



The Mayor might say 7, but this writer has been waiting 9 years for this day!

Russell Meddin          bikesharephiladelphia.org

Keep in touch with The Bike-sharing World with The Bike-sharing World Map. It is the premiere resource for information on cities with bike-sharing programs and the complement to The Bike-sharing Blog. Use this easy web address for viewing the map:  

www.bikesharingmap.com.

Follow the Map on Twitter@BikesharingMap

The Bike-sharing World - Third Week of April 2015

Europe:
Denmark:
                         Copenhagen:

Gobikes on the street in Copenhagen

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. The Copenhagen Bycyklen operator, Gobike, has 14 days to complete its contract with the cities of Copenhagen and Frederiksberg and the Danish State Railway Company, DBS, according to Danish news source, The Local. If Gobike does not fulfill its promise of 1,860 bicycles and electric charging stations by May 1, 2015 it will be forced into bankruptcy.

Gobike won the contract in 2012 to bring advanced 4th generation bike-sharing to the Copenhagen region, thereby replacing the old 2nd generation service that had existed since 1995. The Gobike bicycle has computer tablets on the handlebar to transact payments, give GPS directions, and facilitate advertising. The bike is also a pedelec -- an electric-assist bicycle. About 420 of the bikes are in operation currently in Copenhagen and Frederiksberg, but the contract has not yet been satisfied as this amounts to only 23% of the full number of bikes required. Many of Gobike's problems stem from its bicycle manufacturing supplier, MIFA, which had financial problems preventing bike manufacture.

Gobike Tablet Computer

The Gobike experiment is a giant step forward for bike-sharing with all of the transit interconnection and mapping features that it introduced for bike-sharing in the 21st century. Even if it stumbles, the future of bike-sharing has begun to roll in the same direction.

Let's see what May brings to Copenhagen.

UPDATE: Gobike is given until mid-October 2015 to complete the build out of the system with the full complement of bikes as contracted: The Local dk

News in Danish: DRdk, Computerworld and DRdk

Images: The Bike-sharing Blog

Russell Meddin           bikesharephiladelphia.org

Keep in touch with The Bike-sharing World with The Bike-sharing World Map. It is the premiere resource for information on cities with bike-sharing programs and the complement to The Bike-sharing Blog. Use this easy web address for viewing the map:  

www.bikesharingmap.com.

Follow the Map on Twitter@BikesharingMap

The Bike-sharing World -The First Week of April 2015.

1,000,000

The flowers are starting to burst into colors in the Northern Hemisphere and leaves are turning into bright colors in the Southern Hemisphere all to celebrate the World-wide Bike-sharing Fleet reaching over 1,000,000 bicycles.

The Bike-sharing World Map, bikesharingmap.com, monitors the movement of automated public use bicycle systems all over the world. In its end of the year summary report for December 2014 (see here) fleet size was inching up to the one million mark.

World-wide fleet December 31, 2014

Since the beginning of 2015, 18 new cities have launched programs and many are coming out of the winter months with bigger fleets. This has pushed the total of bicycles used in automated public systems to over one million!

The question now is, how to celebrate this achievement? 

It is easy, use this momentous day to take a ride on one of these million bikes.

Russell Meddin           bikesharephiladelphia.org

Keep in touch with The Bike-sharing World with The Bike-sharing World Map. It is the premiere resource for information on cities with bike-sharing programs and the complement to The Bike-sharing Blog. Use this easy web address for viewing the map:  

www.bikesharingmap.com.

Follow the Map on Twitter@BikesharingMap

The Bike-sharing World -Second Week of February 2015

North America:
Mexico:
   
   Mexico City:

The largest bike-sharing program in the Americas

For its 5th year anniversary on February 16, Ecobici in Mexico City enters its forth phase expansion with the opening of 171 new stations with an additional 2,300 bikes in the Bonito Juárez section of the City. This makes Ecobici the largest bike-share program in the Americas. Claiming 6,500 bikes in 444 stations this week, Mexico City topples the bike-share North American leaders of New York City, Montréal, and D.C.

Happy Anniversary Ecobici!

images: Ecobici: Mancera

Russell Meddin           bikesharephiladelphia.org

Keep in touch with The Bike-sharing World with The Bike-sharing World Map. It is the premiere resource for information on cities with bike-sharing programs and the complement to The Bike-sharing Blog. Use this easy web address for viewing the map:  

www.bikesharingworld.com.

Follow the Map on Twitter@BikesharingMap