Future of bike sharing remains cloudy

According to this article from the National Post, the future of the Bixi bike sharing program remains uncertain.

A fuzzy business plan, regulatory issues in Quebec (which may force Bixi to sell its profitable international arm), and some suspicion about the motives of municipal elected officials who support bike sharing (are they doing it to look green and electable, or because it makes sense?) are combining to cast a pall over bicycle sharing.

 

Comments

[Mike]

Meh. There are other bike sharing systems other than BIXI, though BIXI does it quite well in terms of ease of use and quality of service. (My wife and I were in Paris on Sunday, tried using their Velib bike sharing service - much more complicated, and to make things worse, it turned out all of the bikes in our station were broken!)

My main concern is that we may be destroying the future of bike sharing in Waterloo by supporting low-quality 'bike sharing' services like CAB in the name of cost savings. The fact that you can't just swipe and go, but instead must register at one particular location, keys must be signed out from shops that aren't open 24/7, and the limited reach of the network means that usage rates will continue to be very, very low. Unfortunately, this will mean that when an organization that is serious about bike sharing steps up to the plate, our municipalities will point to the lack of success with CAB and refuse to invest.

[clasher]

CAB was designed to be accessible to anyone in the community, not just those with credit cards. Given they only had 30,000$ to work with I dunno what you expected to happen, bixi in Ottawa spend 628,000$ to get a 100 bike system in place. Consider also that the CoK only spends 200,000$ toward the master cycling plan.

I think it's insane to build expensive systems for non-cyclists to dip their toes in the water or for tourists. I think CAB was a terrible waste of money, skills and labour. I think they had less than 50 members. I still think they should have just used the money to open another community bike shop in the city.

The regular citizens that ride this city desperately need more reasonable cycling infrastructure long before we need any more bike sharing programs. I mean we have bars across the major bike path that killed someone. I don't really care if yuppies have to walk a few blocks to go from cafe to cafe.

[Tim Kenyon]

National Post writes sceptical article about publicly funded green transit initiative, citing Calgary alderman and head of Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Dunno how much to make of that, to be honest.

[Phil Hiems]

Where is Waterloo's bike sharing system, announced last year with much fanfare, now?

Do you have time for some investigative journalism, Bill? Because those bikes are abandoned and rotting on the vine, as it were.

Bike share programs need to be appropriate to their environment, and the system set up here was exactly the kind of green-washing nonsense politicians love, yet which detracts interest from more useful but more controversial projects like bike lanes.

I wish it wasn't the case, and I'm sure many of those involved had the best of intentions, but this community's bike share program seems to be an unequivocal failure.