When a taxi driver complains about Bixis cutting back on clients you’ve got something that is more than just a gadget.The big question for me when the Bixi, Montreal’s bike share program, was rolled out last spring was: who would use them? Bike riding has grown around here in the last few years, as more bike paths have been constructed on busy streets. Bike traffic is even approaching a critical mass on some side streets. Everybody who might want to ride a bike already has one, right?
No. The locals have figured out how to use the bikes for short strips across town which is what was intended. “It’s real competition for the short trips,” a cabbie told me last week.
They cost $5 a day or $78 a season. Then you can ride for 30 minutes without cost. Fees increase rapidly if you don’t return the bike too one of the stands: the second half hour costs $1.50, the third, $3, and $6 for subsequent half hours. The idea, of course, is not to compete with standard tourist bike rentals, but to provide bikes for short trips, the way Vélib does in Paris.
The latest figures show 8,419 subscribers, 77,070 occasional users, 278 installed stations for a total of 3,612,799 kilometers travelled. Initially there were complaints about vandalism to the Bixi stations and a certain amount of lack of coordination in transferring the bikes around (a key element is making sure the bikes are where the people wanting them are which means some trucking the around town.) But I haven’t heard complaints the last few weeks, and certainly it’s clear that the bikes at the station in the next block are being used.
The Bixi folks are hoping to sell the bike system around the world: London and Boston have just signed on, while Bixis got a try-out in Manhattan and Los Angeles a few days ago. That the system, developed where sane folks don’t ride bikes from mid-November until the end of March, is getting such a welcome in more temperate climes seems to me quite remarkable.
Mid-November, by the way, is what the cabbie is waiting for. “Then business will pick up, “ he said.
2 comments:
I am deeply disturbed by all the anti-cyclist comments in the letters and on the soundoff at the Gazette. Fortunately, the francophone papers tend to be less cretinous on such topics, with the exception of scab chroniqueur Richard Martineau at that nasty locked-out tabloid.
A lycra lout bombing down the mountain hit a pedestrian and left her with bruises and cracked ribs, and didn't even stop to see if anything was wrong. The same thing had happened to me several years ago - fortunately no bone cracks or breaks, though I did have very nasty bleeding bruises - on pont Jacques-Cartier when I was teaching in Longueuil. Shameful behaviour which should also be illegal, even if the perpetrator is a cyclist, jogger, or person walking who whomps somebody with a load they are carrying.
But there is a great and vicious outpouring calling for all manner of silly restrictions on cyclists - even those of us who menace nobody except the monopoly of the car. Pity there is no such pile-on every time a car kills or maims someone.
I'll certainly never use Bixi, but it is one more step towards a more cyclable city and taking back space from the car, along with the creation of the bicycle lane on University - and the pedestrianisation of other streets.
''I am deeply disturbed by all the anti-cyclist comments in the letters and on the soundoff at the Gazette. ''
Well its killing taxi jobs
and also did you realise how people are driving those bixi like igniorant
no proctection at all
Go see what taxi community drivers said about Bixi
http://www.taxiavendre.com
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