The Bike-sharing World Mid-November 2012

NORTH AMERICA:
USA

San Diego, California:

Decobike at Petco Ball Park San Diego

San Diego is to be decorated with bike-sharing from Decobike.

Today the City of San Diego announced in a press release that it has picked Decobike, the master of ocean side bike-sharing, to provide the city with a new program. Covering the area stretching from La Jolla to Downtown San Diego along the coast, there will be 1,800 bikes in 180 stations to start. Projected schedule to launch the system is Fall 2013. It is to be a comprehensive system with about 4 stations on average per 2.5 km² (one square mile) and a bicycle to resident ratio of about 1 to 155 in the areas served.. This will position San Diego to become one of North America's most utilized bike sharing programs. With Decobike picked for San Diego, Southern California is no longer being considered a reservation of Bike Nation.

Fullerton, California:

Speaking of Bike Nation, more of the Los Angeles basin will be covered by Bike Nation. This week Fullerton, California picked Bike Nation to develop it's bike-sharing pilot program of 165 bikes in 15 stations. It hopes to expand this program to 515 bikes in 50 stations in two phases. No start date was stated in the announcement. Bike Nation now has programs planned for Anaheim, Fullerton, Los Angeles, Venice and Westwood California.

Long Beach, New York:

Green Decobike Station on shattered boardwalk

Speaking of DecoBike, when Hurricane Sandy hit Long Beach, NY, it tore up the ocean side boardwalk, but left this green Decobike Station standing. Before the hard hurricane winds, Decobike removed the bikes and put them into safe storage. All the stations have survived, but it will be a little time before the boardwalk is replaced and the Decobikes will begin rolling again.

New York City, New York:

Citi Bike Storage Building 293

Speaking of Hurricane Sandy, reports in the New York Times and New York Post indicate that the first floor storage area of the Brooklyn Navy Yard building where the hundreds of bikes and stations for New York's Citi Bike program are housed, took in between 1.5 and 2 meters (4 to 6 feet) of water with the Hurricane's ocean surge. A NYCDOT spokesperson indicated that there was damage to the equipment, but it was too early to determine the extent of the problem.
We all hope that there will be no further delay in deployment of Citi Bikes.

Update: According to the Montreal Gazette, a spokesperson for the equipment supplier to the Citi Bike program said that hundreds of bikes and many stations suffered damage from the hurricane. The article also indicated that before the hurricane, ongoing test of the program's software, which had delayed the start of Citi Bike in July, were not going well.

Boston, Massachusetts:

Boston's regional bike-share, The Hubway, held a contest to determine the best visualization of the trip data for 500,000 of its rides. The Hubway Data Visualization Challenge has announce the winners. The First Place award goes to Ta Chiraphadhanakul. All the other winners can been seen on the Data Visualization web page. There were 67 entries all of which are very good. We're sorry our friend Ollie didn't make the top 10!


images: NBC 7, Decobike, Brooklyn Navy Yard, Hubway, Bike Nation

Russell Meddin       bikesharephiladelphia.org

The Bike-sharing World -The First Week of July 2012

NORTH AMERICA

  Canada

           Vancouver, British Columbia

The Bike-sharing Blog attended last week’s Velo-city Global 2012 Conference. Bike-sharing was one of the pivotal themes of the week.

The Bike-share Bloggers, Paul deMaio and I made presentations on the topics of Municipal Best Practices and Maping the Explosion of Bike-sharing, the latter with the help of Oliver O’Brien of CASA and Andrea Beatty of B-cycle,  co-presented on the topics of Bike-sharing as an extention of public transit with representatives from Vancouver, Boston and Montréal and co-hosted roundtable discussions on Regional Bike-sharing Lessons with representatives from San Francisco and Boston.

There were presentations on bike-sharing from the four corners of the globe and the standard reference of everyone was our very own, The World Bike-sharing Map! 

Public Bike Systems Company supplied bicycles to all the hundreds of attendees to the Conference

One of more interesting exhibits at the conference, was a new bike-share bike out of Switzerland, Velobility. The bike centralizes all the electronics and the mechanics into a one “box” drive train, called the Ridebox.

The Ridebox has the capacity to be configured as strictly mechanical or as a pedelec with single or multiple speeds. It could have active GPS to track the bike and special remote locking to disable the bike. It could be configured to recognize a users’ RFID and set the bike to that user’s preferences. All of this is secure in the enclosed belt drive box. There is more information on the web sites Velobility and Innovations.  Every bike-share vendor at the conference was suitably impressed. Types of these bikes are now in use in several cities in Switzerland and Germany. 


To this bike-share blogger, this bicycle was really the first indication of 4th generation bike-sharing! Couple this bike with a single mobility card (or telecommunications device) that can be used on bike-share, trains, subways, light rail, trams, buses, car sharing, on-street and off-street private bike and private car parking and there will be true 21st century “4th gen” bike-sharing.


Also at Velo-city Global 2012, Michael Jones, the CEO of Portland's Alta Planning, the sister company to Alta Bicycle Share, which is negotiating with Vancouver to implement bike-sharing next spring, said that they are looking into helmet vending machines for all 125 bike stations according to The Vancouver Courier.

  USA
                Long Beach, New York

           

Decorating the Long Island beach community just outside New York City, is the first Decobike system outside of Florida. With 15 stations and 200 bikes, the system launched on Wednesday, June 27, 2012. Like its Miami Beach sister, the system can be used as subscription based bike-sharing or for hourly rentals from the same stations. The pricing structure can be seen here. On the first Sunday of operation, the system had close to 2 usages for each one of the bikes. That is very respectable. There is a train every hour from Penn Station in New York City directly to a Decobike station in Long Beach, NY. Everyone in the New York City metropolitan area can get a taste of bike-sharing before the City serves up its main course.


               Kansas City, Missouri

To paraphrase Fats Domino* Bike-sharing is going to Kansas City, Kansas city here it comes. Tomorrow, July 3rd, early in the afternoon,  Kansas City B-cycle rolls across downtown KC with 90 bicycles to outfit 12 stations. Sponsored by a partnership with Bike WalkKC and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City this system brings more bike-sharing into the middle of North America. The system will offer daily, weekly, monthly and yearly subscription passes. The rates can be seen here. This brings the total of B-cycle systems to twelve for the beginning of July. We wonder if Kansas City B-cycle has plans on taking a page from Nice Ride Minnesota, Capital bixi, Capital Bikeshare or Hubway by jumping the river and going into Kansas City, Kansas!

EUROPE
  France
                  Paris
The 5th Anniversary Celebration of Vélib' (July 15, 2007) began the last weekend of June with a Grand Party "The 24hr de Vélib'" on the Champs-Élysees to raise money for various charities. Not even bad weather could dampen the spirits of Les Vélibeurs who rode the length of the Grand Avenue over and over again. The more they rode the more money was raised.  There is a good recounting of this event by Marion at Vélib' et Moi


In French and English


ASIA
  China
                  Hangzhou

To start July, Hangzhou Public Bicycle Service debuted an essential part on any great bike-sharing system, a mascot!

It's name is "'C' class or 'C' earners." The 'C' at the top of its head stands for the French word Cyclisme. This is a goal for all its riders. The face resembles the spokes of a wheel of a bike-share bike, but in the shape of the great West Lake of Hangzhou. The color of its clothes is that of the Hangzhou bikes!

The stuffed toy dolls and lapel pins will be for sale online at Hangzhou Public Bike Service soon! 

Images: The Dike Sharing Blog, Decobike Patch, BikeWalkKC Video: Marie de Paris "C class"

Lyrics Kansas City by Jerry Leiber and Jack Stoller


Russell Meddin      bikesharephiladelphia.org

DECOBIKE in Great Shape Its First Year

With Decobike, life is a beach

March 15th marked the first anniversary of DECOBIKE. Everyday each DECOBIKE is used on average 5 to 6 times by residents, tourists, and the Beautiful People who flock to Miami Beach, Florida. DECOBIKE is the first privately funded city-wide bike-sharing system in North America. It has completed its first year by logging close to 720,000 rides, with 100,000 in the last 30 days.

Starting with 550 bikes, there are now 800 bikes in the system. Soon there will 1,000 bikes rolling through the Miami Beach streets and next to the ocean. In its first year, 4% of the City's residents have subscribed to the long-term membership option. The program is celebrating its anniversary financially in the black.


Next week, DECOBIKE expands into the neighboring community of Surfside just north of Miami Beach. Even further north in May, a new DECOBIKE system with 400 bikes debuts in Long Beach, New York, just outside New York City.


As with all bike-sharing systems, DECOBIKE proves that all bike-share users are Beautiful People.


image: DecoBike


Russell Meddin    bikesharephiladelphia.org