I live in the Financial District in Manhattan.
We have this free bicycle rental service: Bike Around Downtown https://www.bikearounddowntown.com/Default.aspx
French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality
31–40 of 49 posts
Re: French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Over-engineering. They could have done the same with bikes that cost significantly less.
Quite. In Amsterdam, people mostly ride boring-looking, old-fashioned but very durable bikes, rather than being particular objects of desire. On the other hand, no public program is immune from vandals or the disaffected - some of whom are truly desperate but many of whom are just trolls.
The interesting thing about the boring-looking, old-fashioned, durable Dutch model of bike is it's becoming a luxury brand abroad. I've certainly seen it as having a certain cachet in the UK and US.
Re: French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
This article seems oddly focused on France. I also know of similar efforts in Germany. And I have seen similar bikes in Spain. It would be much more interesting to get a European perspective.
Not just European: Montreal, Canada has this too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bixi Interestingly enough, vandalism seems to be much lower, though still significant: "...one in five bikes have been damaged and 15% of bike racks are defective..."
While many bikes are still defective, they have fixed the problem with the racks that allowed people to steal bikes (and break the rack at the same time).
Re: French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality
#34There's been a push in my area to introduce a similar concept, but with cars. It's based off of the San Francisco model:
Anyone from the Bay area have any feedback?
Re: French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality
#35Comment on the ground - quoted in the article - is that the scheme is "not a complete success". But reading the article as a whole, you'd hardly think that - you'd think it's a complete failure.
Which shows that not every article you read in the press is accurate. It's easy to use a bunch of misleading statistics, put them out of context, and paint a situation that sounds much worse than it really is. What I can say for sure is that I know many people in Paris who love the program. You must understand that it's a much better alternative than owning a bike. You can really pick up the bike only on the segment…
I've been in Paris a number of times and used the system; the biggest issue I've had was finding a bay when time was running out for a charging boundary, as they are on side streets, rather than main thoroughfares. I don't generally have any complaints with the system; rather my complaint is with the article and its odd bias.
So, I presume you don't mean me when you say "you".
Re: French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality
#36Having used the velibs in my visit to Paris last week, I feel that the article is making the program seem bad on purpose. As a tourist, I found it a brilliant idea.
Typically, out of about 30 or so bicycles in a station, I usually found about 2 in a bad condition. And they were usually NOT vandalized. It was most often a punctured tyre, a bent or missing basket or something similar.
The most serious problem that I found was the fact that sometimes all the docks in the station near your destination would be occupied. I quite liked the bikes themselves, and found them in some respects innovative, but I can't imagine that they cost 3500€. To register in the system you use a credit card from which 150€ is temporarily kept as a guarantee. I can't imagine that the price of the bike is over an order of magnitude more than that.
I wish my home city (Athens) had a program like that.
Re: French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality
#37There is no way a bike costs that much. Unless they hide gold under the seat, that is. They must be counting other expenses, like salaries or repairs and dividing by the number of bikes.
And before feeling too sorry for the poor company that provides the service, note that it thus obtained a monopoly on advertisement in Paris, which is a big deal. They regularly have columns in the newspapers complaining about vandalism, and how it's destroying its business, but they never complain that they got too much advertising space ;-)
Also bike costs are shared with the city. I have not subscribed to the service, since I very often see bike stations which are:
1) either full of bikes (no way to dock yours) 2) or with no bikes ready to ride at all
which means it lacks one of the fundamental aspect you would need from such a service: reliability. Technically, they are supposed to be moving bikes from stations which are full to stations which are empty but I have the feeling this is less likely to happen.
That's why I prefer having my own bike, even if it may be a pain to find a good place to park it.
For some reason, parisians don't feel the same way I do about reliability. They still use public transport and use the bike (when available) to go to/from the closest metro station.
Re: French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality
#38There's been a push in my area to introduce a similar concept, but with cars. It's based off of the San Francisco model: http://www.citycarshare.org Anyone from the Bay area have any feedback?
CityCarShare is fantastic if you live somewhere with sufficient density that driving is (truly) not necessary for most trips.
We use bicycles, public transportation, and walking for nearly all of our trips, but rely on citycarshare for shopping, moving furniture, occasional weekend trips, etc. We also use a corporate car share account to move servers to/from the colocation facility.
It's a fantastic service -- far cheaper than owning a car, and zero-hassle. I hated dealing with the complexities of car ownership, from insurance and DMV registration to regular maintenance, speeding/parking tickets, and the general agitation of driving.
If you've never lived without a car, it can be surprisingly liberating to sell yours off.
With the money you save not owning a car, you can afford higher rent for a more desirable area, longer-term car rentals for one-off trips, etc.
Re: French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality
#39"Many of the specially designed bikes, which cost $3,500 each" What were they thinking??? Surely it must be possible to design a cheaper bike for that purpose? The electronics shouldn't be much more complicated than an average mobile phone?
I wasn't too surprised that they cost a lot to make. I mean, after all, shopping carts cost ~175$.
Though, 1300$ does sound more reasonable.
Re: French Ideal of Bicycle-Sharing Meets Reality
#40I remember from the summer I spent in Innsbruck, Austria (my dad was teaching on a summer abroad program for American students) in 2003 that there were hundreds of bikes standing on orderly bike racks or improvisationally leaning against various structures on nearly every nontrivial street. The biggest surprise to someone just coming from America is that very few of them were locked, and it did not seem to be a major…
Uhm, yeah, that's certainly not universal in Europe. I had 4 bikes (including having the locks cut) stolen in 2 years in Berlin before I just gave up.
A lot of people here get cheap old bikes just because they're the least likely to get stolen (though I had two of those stolen too).