Transit Taking Transit

Equal distribution of bikes is one of the hardest nuts to crack with bike-sharing, especially if your program has 20,600 bikes. The creative minds of Vélib' have developed a formidable solution to this problem - take a bus!

Starting May 4, the first of two Vélib' buses began transporting bikes from stations with an over-supply to those in need. The buses hold 62 bikes each, which is nearly three times more than the trucks which are used now for smaller stations. Staff simply walk the bikes onto the bus and with the use of a pulley system, raise one bike at a time, and send it to the other end of the bus via a roller system to keep the bikes compact during transport.

Here's a video showing how it works:

by mairiedeparis

Another reminder that bike-sharing complements other forms of transit and is complemented.

Image credit: Vélib'

Paul DeMaio, MetroBike
Russell Meddin, www.bikesharephiladelphia.org

Melbourne Tender Out

The Victoria, Australia Department of Transport released a Request for Tender (RFT) to find an operator of a bike-sharing program for Melbourne. According to the Department of Transport's website, "The Public Bicylce [sic] System will provide bicycle stations in key locations around inner Melbourne and give the public access to bicycles from the system 365 days a year, for short, inner-city trips. The total system, upon start up will have about 600 bicycles within the inner city."

A briefing session will be Monday at 10am for parties interested in learning more. The tender closes on June 18.

p.s. - The bike-sharing program operator should also include a spellcheck program in their tender for the Dept. of Transport to help them spell "Bicycle" correctly. Of course, we here at The Bike-sharing Blog never make a misspellin.

image credit: Tulane University

UPDATE - August 6, 2009:

JCDecaux pulled out of bidding for Melbourne’s bike-sharing tender competition. Steve O’Connor of JCDecaux Australia says that the Melbourne plan for 600 bikes is too small and lacked commercial incentives according to Australia’s The Age. JCDecaux won the tender for Brisbane’s 2000 bike system and is currently installing the program there.

The Bike-sharing Blog Turns 2

Happy Birthday to The Bike-sharing Blog! It turns 2 today. If The Blog were a child, it would be a toddler already.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes this stage of life as, "During this time, your child is becoming increasingly more mobile, and aware of himself and his surroundings. During this stage, your toddler will show greater independence, begin to show defiant behavior, [...] and imitate the behavior of others, especially adults and older children."

Much of the same can be said of bike-sharing in general: it assists people in becoming more mobile and aware of themselves and their surroundings. Bike-sharing is helping people show greater independence away from the automobile. We are showing defiant behavior by denying the status quo of automobile-dominated societies and launching ourselves into the post-carbon age. We are imitating the behavior of greener societies which have placed greater demands on the mobility and flexibility that bicycling offers and are receiving the benefits of being healthier societies, or of one day striving to become one.

Your contributions about local bike-sharing activities have been tremendous and enhanced The Blog's efforts towards advocating for bike-sharing around the world. Thank you for your continued interest in bike-sharing and The Bike-sharing Blog.

Sincerely,
Paul DeMaio
MetroBike, LLC
Washington, D.C., USA

Velo-city 2009 and Villo!

I've recently returned from the Velo-city 2009 conference in Brussels, Belgium where I spoke in a session dedicated to bike-sharing. The packed session had presentations by:

- Esther Anaya, Bicicleta Club de Catalunya (BACC), Spain, speak about "Public Bikes, are they developing as true public transport in Spain?";
- Sara Basterfield and German Dector-Vega, CTC and Transport for London, UK, spoke about "Bike-sharing in European Cities"; and
- Jean-Sébastien Decaux, JCDecaux, France, spoke about "Public bicycles in Brussels. Why they have a future?".

My presentation was titled "Bike-sharing: its History and Future" and can be downloaded now. The others' presentations should be available on the Velo-city website in two weeks. Each presentation was insightful and well worth a view.

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While in Brussels I got to see the preparations for the relaunch of Villo!, the region's new and improved bike-sharing program. The program got off to a poor start a few years ago, however, now it's coming back with a greater number of bikes and stations to tame this city of autos. The reincarnated program will have 2,500 bikes at 180 stations and will be available in the 16 cities of the Brussels capital region. The service will be offered year-round by JCDecaux through an advertising contract.

The bike facilities in Brussels are decent, with cycle tracks and bike lanes. However, these facilities generally they aren't being used. Offering bike-sharing on this greater scale will provide a solid option in moving about the compact medieval city and its surroundings to make a dent in the auto-centric behavior and begin to foster a bike culture.

BIXI -The First Large Scale Bike-sharing Program In North America

Tuesday morning, May 12, 2009 at 10:30 AM at City Hall in Montréal, Quebec, Canada, BIXI the largest bike-sharing program in North America begins. With 3,000 bikes and 300 stationes planned, it will be 30 times larger than the program in Washington, DC.  Whether you subscribe for $78 a year, $28 a month or $5 a day, there is no charge for the first 30 minute ride. The self-contained solar powered bike stations are innovative in that they are easily reconfirgured and redeployed if necessary. The name is a contraction of BIcyle and taXI. You just pick up a bike at one station and drop it off at any one of the 299 others, just like a taxi! Watch the video:

Russell Meddin  www.bikesharephiladelphia.org

Pioneering Bike-sharing Program Goes Dark After 11 Years

On Sunday May 10, 2009 the world’s first public automated information based bike-sharing program shut down. Vélo à la Carte started in 1998 by Clear Channel Adshel in Rennes, France ended its 11 years of almost free service in this capital city of Brittany. Vélo à la Carte is credited with starting the 21^st Century bike-share revolution now spot lighted on the world stage with Vélib in Paris. A bicycle revolution that is now spreading to cities all over the world. 

With only 200 bicycles over 25 stations in a city with 200,000 inhabitants, Vélo à la Carte has seen almost 1 million usages with 11,000 yearly subscribers. It was the first system deployed for the general public in a metropolitan area utilizing a RFID (radio frequncy identification) card to access the bikes.

Over the years, three different bicycle designs were used in the system. A €23 deposit gave users access to 2 hours of no charge bike-sharing. It is a sad passing in the vélos en libre service world.   Vélo à la Carte

Do not shed a tear for the Rennais. Although, they will no longer have Vélo à la Carte, they will have a complete menu of 900 new le vélo star bikes in 40 stations starting June 6, 2009. In the near future, it will serve a larger area plus the suburbs with 1285 bikes and 117 stations . Le vélo star system keeps Rennes as an innovator in bike-sharing. The regional transit card, Kerrigo, will also access the bikes.

le vélo star

A spokesperson for Clear Channel said that Vélo à la Carte was part of a street furniture (bus shelters) program in Rennes. The contract exspired recently. Rennes tendered the new street furniture and bike-sharing as two sepearate contracts. Clear Channel won the street furniture tender maintaining its advertising presence in the City. Keolis won the bike tender and will start operating the scheme in June. Kéolis’s contract will have no link to advertising.

Photos: Rennes Métropoles, Vélo à la Carte, Ouest-France  and Kéolis

Russell Meddin  www.bikesharephiladelphia.org

Around the Bike-sharing World this first week of May

From Australia:

Starting this week, as a way to increase awareness of Bike-sharing down under, Common Bike is offering a three week bike-sharing program in Melbourne, Australia. The demonstration is organized by students with the assistance of Ronald Haverman of Bike Sharing Solutions from the Netherlands. As reported in the The Age, the demonstration coincides with the Melbourne Road Minister's plan to ask for a tender offer to be issued for a large bike-sharing program there. Mr. Haverman said that public bike hire would be good for Melbourne continuing, "I think it's good for the very spread-out suburbs, the low-density areas, you need bike stations almost everywhere." Watch a video of the RMIT student run bike-hire demonstration.

From Asia:

Residents and tourists enjoy Green Bangkok Bike in Thailand’s capital. The manual system began last August with 300 bikes and eight service counters and stations. It serves the historic Rattanakosin section of Bangkok and is run by the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration. There is no cost as long as you can provide a valid national ID card or passport.

From North America:

As the images of last summer’s Bike-sharing experiment at the 2008 Republican and Democratic National Conventions in Minneapolis and Denver fade from our memory, so does the realization of bike-sharing systems in both those cities in 2009. Both Minneapolis and Denver had planned to have systems up and running this summer.
In March, Minneapolis announced it was postponing its 1000 bike Nice Ride program from spring/summer 2009 to summer 2010 Bike-sharing Blog March 16, 2009. 
Yesterday, Denver postponed its 600 bike Denver B-cycle debut until spring 2010 as reported in Westword.

BIXI begins in Montréal on Tuesday May 12, 2009!

  

Photos: Commonbike, Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, Nice Ride, B-cycle and BIXI

Russell Meddin  www.bikesharephiladelphia.org

London Cycle Hire Shifts into High Gear

Even without an operator for the system, Transport of London has begun submitting planning applications for locating bike-sharing stations. This week the first four applications have been submitted to the Camden Council one of the areas in Greater London see map. The applications for the rest of the 396 stations will be continually submitted throughout the spring and summer to have the 6000 bike system ready to open in May 2010.

Keeping an election promise, the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said: "I pledged to deliver a cycling revolution across the city, and there is now a growing excitement about our cycle hire scheme, which will give all Londoners the opportunity to hop on a bike and experience the joys of cycling. Much like hailing a cab, people will be able to pick up one of 6,000 bikes, and zip around town to their hearts content - not only a quick, easy, and healthy option, but one that will also make London a more livable city," reports Britain’s Bike for All. With bike-sharing stations no more than 300 meters apart, the London system - is expected to generate an additional 40,000 bicycle trips every day in central London.

London is not the only United Kingdom capital looking into bike-sharing. According to The Scotsman News yesterday, Edinburgh’s transport bosses are to push on with plans to introduce a bike sharing scheme in the Capital. The Edinburgh council chiefs said that the scheme, which would help reach the target of four per cent of all journeys being by bike by 2010.

Russell Meddin www.bikesharephiladelphia.org

photo: Transport of London

The Problem of Moral Hazard

A recent article by CNN titled "City bike-sharing picks up speed" discusses the problem of moral hazard. Wikipedia defines moral hazard as "the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk." Wikipedia goes on to define a specific type of moral hazard which is called a " 'principal-agent problem', where one party, called an agent, acts on behalf of another party, called the principal. The agent usually has more information about his or her actions or intentions than the principal does, because the principal usually cannot perfectly monitor the agent. The agent may have an incentive to act inappropriately (from the viewpoint of the principal) if the interests of the agent and the principal are not aligned." As proven by JCDecaux's recent threats to close stations plagued by theft and vandalism as reported here at The Bike-sharing Blog in February, the bike-sharing industry has proven it is not free of controversy and has the problem of moral hazard.

The CNN article quoted me stating that "[T]he advertising company does not benefit from revenues generated by the system as the jurisdiction does, so the advertising company does not have the same incentive to keep the bikes maintained as the jurisdiction would if it were operating the system. In fact, the better the advertising company has the bikes maintained, the more expensive it would be, and the less profit they would keep from the advertising contract."

Stronger oversight of bike-sharing programs by local governments is needed to ensure the principal knows as much as the agent, as described above. One important step towards this is separating the advertising contract with the bike-sharing contract so true costs can be realized. A better method of provision could be the locality providing a management fee to the operator for the bike-sharing service. This management fee would include staffing, maintenance, distribution, and customer care.

The service provider also should benefit monetarily from the success of the program and conversely be fined for not providing the quality of service to which they agreed to perform. Bike-sharing contracts should have carrots and sticks to encourage not just fair play by the agent, but superior behavior that is appropriate for a modern transit service with high customer interaction and expectations.

image credit: Wall Street Journal

Earth Day 2009

Third generation bike-sharing (see history) has now seen 10 Earth Day anniversaries. Over the last three anniversaries, the number of systems exploded from one or two to over a hundred. This Earth Day finds North America with two operational third generation bike-sharing systems and more on the way.

In celebration of Earth Day, the New York City Planning Commission has published a thorough feasibility study for bike-sharing in New York City with Bike Share Opportunities in New York City.

Russell Meddin Bike Share Philadelphia

Yeah, We Can Do Hills Too

Some of bike-sharing's naysayers have complained that it won't work in their home city because it's too hilly. Well, this isn't a problem anymore with Bicincitta's introduction of Mobik in hilly Genova (Genoa), Italy. MoBike is the world's second 3rd generation bike-sharing program with pedal-assist bikes. (Monaco had the first pedal-assist launch in February.) The bikes can go 19 mi (30 km) on a charge. When the battery is low and parked at a station, the station recharges it and will release it to another customer when fully recharged.

According to Mentelocale, the service launched on April 5 with 60 bikes and 6 stations. MoBike is a partnership of the Municipality of Genova, Mobi (laboratory of sustainable mobility) in collaboration with AMT (Genova Car-sharing.) The cost to join the service is $40 (30 EUR) and the first 30 minutes of each trip are free. With a successful program, authorities plan to ramp up the service to 200 bikes.



Farell Simone, Deputy Mayor and Councilor of Genova, stated that bike-sharing "is the critical mass of reform, the global movement, which manifests on two wheels."

With MoBike, the people of Genova can do Mo hills and Mo trips by bike.

photo credit: Mentelocale

Update: Xavier B. informs The Bike-sharing Blog that Parma, Italy and Segovia, Spain incorporated electric-assist bikes on a limited basis.

Easter Bunny Delivers 3rd Generation Bike-sharing to College in Chicago

St. Xavier University's new Green Bike Program is the first 3rd generation bike-sharing system on a North American college campus and only the second such system on a college campus worldwide, after the University of Portsmouth's Bikeabout in 1996.

Students, faculty, and staff are enjoying the use of 60 bikes at the 14 stations. The University's RFID value-added card allows use of the system. The first 15 minutes are free and each additional 15 minutes cost $0.60. Though a small closed system (i.e., it's not available to others outside of the university), it is a real advance for bike-sharing in North America. It’s also the first system in the United States for Veloway a subsidiary of Veolia Transportation.It takes college campus bike-sharing into the big leagues.

For a picture of the system see the Bike Share Philadelphia photo album.

Russell Meddin www.bikesharephiladelphia.org

Is it Lockup or Lockout?

The Lord Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has decreed the bikes in London’s 6,000 bike-sharing program, scheduled for operation a year from now, will not have auxiliary locks to tie up the bikes away from the 400 docking stations, according to Times Online. Contrary to original reports, Johnson will allow the use of a renter’s own lock, but will discourage it.

A project spokesperson said, “The use of locks will not be banned. The bikes will not have locks fitted as the purpose of the scheme is to keep the bikes in constant use so as many people as possible can use them. There will be a docking station at around every 300 metres in the cycle hire scheme area, so people who want to use or lock up the bikes will not be more than 150 metres or a two-minute walk from a docking station at any time.”

The Bike-sharing Blog wants to know what you think. Should all bike-share bikes come with auxiliary locks or should the user be totally responsible? Please use the comment link below. We want to hear from you.

Russell Meddin www.bikesharephiladelphia.org

image credit: Transport for London

Google Introduces New Bike-sharing Service

The New York Times has reported today that Google has stepped into the bike-sharing arena as the provider of its 74,300-bike beta service in New York City. This program is more than two times larger than the nearest fleet size in the world. Following the naming lead of other popular programs such as Vélib’ and Velo’v in France, Google has named their program “Veloogle".

Veloogle stations are at every corner in chic neighborhoods, every third corner in up-and-coming neighborhoods, and other communities will maybe get a station sometime in the distant future.

All stations are uniquely powered with an infinite resource - waste cooking oil. Rather than solar power, which would be limited due to the city’s high skyline blocking solar rays to the street, nearby restaurants can pour their waste cooking oil into a compartment on a station’s kiosk and a chemical metabolizing agent breaks the oil down, creating energy, while also disposing of the waste oil in an environmentally friendly method. Google’s Chief of Green Operations, Alvin (Al) Goer, reports that enough energy is produced daily to power all of the 30,500 stations for the day as well as contribute 50 Megawatts of energy back to the local power grid. In other news, the local power company, con Edison, declared bankruptcy today.

To register for use of the program, one must have a Gmail account and provide their credit card number. The first 30 minutes are free and each additional 30-minute period is free too as are most of Google’s services. Already on the first day of use, there have been nearly 53,000 day, month, and year membership registrations and 431,000 trips have been made. Also, a biodegradeable helmet is dispensed for each and every trip which members may reuse or plant. An apple tree will grow from a planted helmet as a homage to the city’s nickname - The Big Apple.

With many technological advances that are pure Google, this system could be one of the very first of a 4th generation of bike-sharing programs. Veloogle’s innovations include: digital advertising on the bikes which are generated based on what the member is thinking; a global positioning system equipped on each bike that uses Google Maps to direct you to your destination via sidewalks or the sole bike lane; and a spam blocker that assists the bike dodge potholes, dog poop, and other debris.

At the launch ceremony, New York Mayor Bloomberg said, “There are two kinds of mayors: those who want bike-sharing and those who have it. I got it! So to all those who said it would never happen here, you can fuhgeddaboutit.”


April Fools! I wish portions of this were true, but it’s an April Fools joke. Hopefully, somebody at Google will read this and make the good stuff come true.

Paul DeMaio
MetroBike, LLC

Tea for Two and Two for Taiwan

This month has seen the launch of two bike-sharing programs in Taiwan - the first in the southern port town of Kaohsiung City, called C-bike, and the second in Taipei, called YouBike.

In Kaohsiung, the service (pictured above) offers 1,500 bikes and 20 stations with plans to expand to 4,500 bikes and 50 stations by the end of May. According to the Kaohsiung City press release, "The system has been constructed on a build- operate-transfer (BOT) basis at a cost of NT$90 million ($2.58 million). Some NT$15 million ($444,000) was put up by both the EPA's air pollution control fund and the city government, and another NT$60 million ($1.77 million) came from the central government's economic stimulus package. Tung Li Development Co. has been commissioned by the government to operate the system over the next five years.

"Members will be able to use the bike for free for the first 30 minutes and will be charged NT$10 ($0.30) for each subsequent 30-minute period for a maximum of NT$230 ($6.80) for 12+ hours."


Taipei's YouBike presently has five stations with an indeterminate number of bikes from the Website (anybody know?). The first 30 minutes are free with additional time at NT$10 ($0.30) per 30 minute period.


Congratulations, Taiwan!

image credits: Yam Blog and David on Formosa