Monday, August 12, 2013

The Bike-sharing World - Mid August 2013

Europe:
United Kingdom:
                        London, England:

One of the first instances of an industrial action in the Bike-sharing world began today with Barclays Cycle Hire according to Skynews. The National Union of Maritime and Transportation Workers began a 48 hour protest against SERCO,the operating company that manages the Bike-sharing program for Transport for London, TfL. The threat of the protest caused many users of the program to take caution and shy away this morning. Though no appreciable disruption has taken place, less than 500 bikes were out at any one time during rush hour this morning. This compares to nearly three times as many on a regular rush hour morning.

Generally bike-sharing is the service that intercedes to ease transit problems in transportation industrial actions. It is good to see that in this type of situation, there have be no appreciable difficulties in London.



UPDATE: August 14, 2012, Industrial action completed. System had no major problems. An article on Barclays Cycle Hire employees: In Action .
On a lighter side in London, last week Mayor Boris Johnson made a gift to the newborn Prince George, third in line to the British Throne, of Cycle Hire Tricycle according to The Express.


As readers of the this Blog recall Mayor Johnson gave a Cycle Hire tandem to Prince George's parents as a wedding gift! See Royal Bike Sharing April 29, 2011

The World: The Bike-sharing World Map is the #1 resource for bike-sharing systems world wide. It shows new systems coming online which might not be covered in The Bike-sharing Blog. With constant updates, it is  the best way to keep up with the ever changing bike-sharing world.

Follow the Map on Twitterhttps://twitter.com/BikesharingMap

See the O'Brien Global Bike Share Map. It shows real time bike usage in 100 Cities!

image: Barclays Cycle Hire, Twitter, Trike-The Express

Russell Meddin              bikesharephiladelphia.org

Thursday, August 1, 2013

Sneak Peak at Copenhagen's Cykel DK

 
Tak (thanks) goes to my friends in the Cities of Copenhagen and Frederiksberg for a sneak peak at their upcoming bike-sharing service, Cykel DK. This new uber high-tech service is to launch this fall in Copenhagen and Frederiksberg, Denmark and will have some unique features such as an Android tablet with built-in GPS, real-time train departures and ticket integration, and real-time info on available bikes and docks in the area. Unfortunately, real-time Tour de France footage won't be available with this version of the software. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for this on version 2.0. 

  



There will be 1,260 bikes at 65 stations and the service, of course, will be available 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. Customers will use the tablet to enter their credit card info to unlock the bike. Tourists and other casual customers will pay 20 DKK (about 3.50 USD) per hour. Frequent customers can purchase a membership for 50 DKK (about 8.85 USD) per month.



Cykel DK is a non-profit that will be operated by the cities of Copenhagen and Frederiksberg plus DSB -- Denmark's national railway system. For the Blog's U.S. readers, can you imagine Amtrak getting into the bike-share business?! It makes so much sense as an extension of their existing inter-city mobility provision. And Amtrak wouldn't even be the second or third national railway to do this: Deutsche Bahn in Germany, Dutch Railways in The Netherlands, and SNCB in Belgium already do this, plus I'm sure a handful of others.



I'm not sure if I've seen a bike-share technology that will truly take us into the 4th generation of bike-share, but from what I've read so far, it's looking like this could be it.

Here's their video with more info.


More information about Cykel DK is at http://www.byogpendlercyklen.dk and gobike is at http://gobike.com.

Image credits: Ursula Bach and gobike