City
Washington DC Gets Bike Sharing - Where's Ours?
You might have already heard of the bike sharing program in France that has been a huge hit with Parisians. Vélib' (short for vélo libre) was launched last year in Paris with around 10,000 bikes available at the near 750 stations for short term rental. That number has since skyrocketed to 20,000 available bikes and almost 1,500 automated rental stations, and it's been cited that the program has resulted in a 10 time increase in bike usage across the city.
Those numbers aren't anything to cough at, so it's no surprise that the idea is starting to take root in other cities, including Washington DC which just launched its Smart Bike DC bike sharing program in partnership with Clear Channel Outdoor. For about $40 a year, Americans in their capital get access to (an admittedly meager) 120 bikes at 10 locations around the city - but hey, it's a start.
That begs the question - with no shortage of bike advocacy groups and a renewed interest in cutting carbon - where's our bike sharing program?
The now-defunct Bikeshare went under a couple years ago due to funding problems, but presumably that's only because the city was looking to get corporate sponsorships for the program. Ontario Power Generation was one to sponsor the program while it was still around, but what's to stop Toronto from signing a similar deal with Clear Channel (or Astral) that they struck up in DC?
We've had our fair share of run-ins with ad companies in the past, and the contract with Astral Media is going to result in some pretty cool looking street furniture (including auto-cleaning washrooms).
Despite being occasionally blasted for our poor urban planning, Toronto has an excellent infrastructure for installation of automated bike rental stations. Think of all the possible communal areas where they could be located - Union Station, Harbourfront, Nathan Philips Square, Toronto Life Square, Trinity Bellwoods, St. James Park, St. Lawrence Market, Yonge & Eglinton and the list goes on. They're completely automated so they require no human resources and minimal maintenance (which would be funded by Astral or Clear Channel).
Stations could be extended outside the GTA - west out towards Mississauga, east towards Pickering and north out to Markham. Vélib' allows riders to take the bikes out for up to three hours - more than enough to make a trip just outside of the city and back.
Some may argue that a large majority of traffic in the downtown core comes from the suburbs, but even if that's the case, that number is going to change (and is already changing) drastically over the coming years as the condo boom really starts taking effect. Parking spaces aren't getting any cheaper when you buy into a new condo - now starting at a cool $30,000 to $32,000, and an influx of personally owned bikes will eventually present additional challenges in terms of where to park all the bikes. A decentralized system will help to mitigate these problems, and make commuting by bike possible for the financially challenged.
Car sharing programs like Zipcar and AutoShare are good baby steps, but to truly make any sort of social and environmental impact, it's going to take more innovative ideas. It's about time Toronto steps up and puts a stake in the ground as being a progressive, forward-looking city with regards to urban transit.
With active community organizations like Metronauts working in tandem with regional transportation planning authority Metrolinx, hopefully we can see innovative and affordable systems such as bike sharing come into play over the next few years in the GTA.
Photos by blogTO Flickr Pool contributors pipeddream (above) and tracer.ca (right)
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http://www.village.ie/Ireland/Environment_&;_Planning/Controversial_billboard_deal_with_Dublin_City_Council/
http://ireland.archiseek.com/news/2008/000134.html
It's unlikely that Toronto will be able to negotiate a deal with any company other than Astral because of their 20 year contract, unless it was done by having the bikes stored internally to TTC stations or something, and that would mean dealing with TTC's advertiser.
If bikesharing is important, fund it from a <a href="http://www.transportbriefing.co.uk/story.php?id=4948";>levy on parking spaces</a> - don't hand it to the ad lobby who have <a href="http://illegalsigns.ca/";>screwed us enough already</a>.
So Paris previously had fewer than 2,000 bikes in use?
The point is that that the system over in Paris is getting people *using* bikes. It's raising awareness that getting around by bike is not only quick, but economical as well.
If there are 20,000 additional SHARED bikes, and say ten different people ride each one, that's 200,000 new cyclists. That puts the number of cyclists pre-implementation at 20,000 for a 10x increase. I'm guessing there are way more than ten borrowers for each bike, but you get the idea.
Carl, if you're concerned about the lack of bike lanes, you should join the <a href="http://takethetooker.ca/?p=301";>Bells On Bloor Ride</a> May 25th.
<a href="http://www.velib.paris.fr/paris/les_newsletters/10_aujourd_hui_nous_vous_connaissons_mieux";>From the Velib website (en francais)</a>
<a href="http://bike-sharing.blogspot.com/2008/05/updated-velib-stats.html";>Translated on the BikeSharing Blog</a>
# Trips to date: 20 million
# Average trips/day: 70,000
# Average trip time: 18 minutes
# 190,000 annual pass holders
# 42% of users are female, 58% are male
# 1/3 of users come from outside the central city
# 17% of users are 46+ years old
# 94% of users like the service
If the program accounts for an additional 70,000 trips a day, a tenfold increase means that there were almost 7,000 trips a day previously.
(This still seems a tad low, but I haven't been to Paris since the '80s, so the balance may have shifted to cars in the interim.)
Very impressive! Anybody know how many bike trips Toronto can boast?
program
The hill that separates the lower town from the St. Clair area and the gradients of some of the streets would have an influence . . shouldn't they?
Paris and Dublin don't have the grades or slopes that Toronto has and that should be an underpinning factor that influences some persons' decision to bike to work.
David I firmly believe this is one of those "if you build it they will come" kind of circumstances. If you check out Paris and DC's implementation, it's dead simple and really slickly implemented with automated stations.
If you make the barrier to entry easy enough, people will be all over it.
Victoria found they had that problem to an insurmountable extent, how are these successful cities avoiding it? Bike Sharing in Toronto sounds like iPod Sharing or Car Radio Sharing or Sexy New Nikes Sharing or Wallet Full Of Money Sharing or...
I think the electronic tracking systems in place in these cities is an effective way of curbing theft. With DC's system, riders are responsible for the bikes and are charged $200 if it goes missing.
As long as the stations are secure enough to prevent theft, I like the idea of putting the onus on the rider.
No bike (or car or house, etc) is theft proof. You just have to make it less desirable for them to steal your stuff than other peoples'.
If someone is going to steal a bike, would they rather take one that is easily accessable, but difficult to sell or use for themselves, or one that is harder to steal, but easier to sell or claim as your own?
I think that depends a lot on the factors involved. If a bike is unique enough and if the city really goes to town advertising the service (so people would recognize the bikes when they saw them), then I think it would be just a deterant as electronic tracking systems, if not moreso.
Who is to say that the tracking system can't be physically removed from the bike or that people wouldn't be able to use fake credit cards (much like the green P parking)?
I'd much rather see the energy go into promoting cycle-friendly road improvements and mass OWNERSHIP of simple bikes.
Or maybe I just don't like to share.
Unless shared bikes MUST be parked at a designated station only, and not simply locked to a ring post. That, however, would make them not terribly useful -- cyclists might still need to dash in somewhere on the way to a more prominent destination.
So it's really up to you. That's why I say making them visually distinctive for the purposes of deterring theft is not a particularly effective strategy. Doing so to raise awareness about the bikes is though.
It would be easier than building hundreds of lockable bike stations, carrying a folding bike on the train or using bike racks on buses - you just drop it off.
It has to be done on a grand scale like in Paris, don't give us crappy junk like those ugly yellow bikes we had.