Melbourne is the first city in Australia to make transportation even more convenient for its residents. Melbourne has decided to create a bike sharing system called the Melbourne Bike Share. This will contribute to a safer, greener and faster transport system for the public. The plan is to construct 50 stations throughout the city. Using the proven Bixi system, there will be 50 stations spread throughout Melbourne with 600 bicycles to service the citizens of Melbourne.

When it comes to pricing, an annual Melbourne Bike Share Subscription cost only $50 a year and it can be used anytime, day or night. A weekly subscription cost $8.00 per week and a daily subscription cost $2.50 per day. As with most bike sharing deployments, the first 30 minutes are free.

What is interesting about this deployment is that Melbourne has a law that requires riders to wear helmets at all the time while riding a bike.  Melbourne has helped to lower the burden on the subscribers as they are given a significant discount on a helmet when purchasing an annual membership. Melbourne is very excited to release this scheme and see how it affects the cities car congestion, rider’s health, and the reduction of greenhouse gasses.

Today bicyclists take to the streets to test the new bike sharing program Minneapolis has to offer. The program, Nice Ride, offers users green bicycles at 60 specially marked stations all around the city. To rent a bicycle all you have to do is sign up on the website. You can register as a yearly subscriber (for 60 dollars), a 30-day subscriber (for 30 dollars), or a 24-hr subscriber (for 5 dollars). Both the month and yearly subscribers get a special key to easily access the bikes from the station. These bikes are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, between the months of April and November.

Nice Ride even provides users with discounted safety wear. Freewheel Bike offers 20% discounts for new Nice Ride subscribers. For safety, if you don’t feel comfortable riding the streets of Minneapolis there are classes you can take with certified instructors. These classes will provide you with key techniques for safe bicycle riding. You can sign up for these classes at: www.bikewalktwincities.org/ambassador.

As part of the grand opening, an inaugural bike ride from the Central Library down Nicollet Mall to Peavey Plaza took place today, where Mayor R.T. Rybak hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony in front of the Downtown YWCA bike share station. To continue the celebrations, on June 17, a forum titled “Cities, Bicycles, and the Future of Getting Around” will be taking place at the Uptown Theater at 7 pm. Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, an avid cyclist and the author of “Bicycle Diaries,” will join Mayor R.T. Rybak and others at the event.

Last week DDOT announced that they will be “expanding” the system to a regional service (including for the first time Arlington, VA) and replacing all of the Smartbike DC hardware and bicycles with BIXI’s system. The new system will be operated by Alta Bike Sharing and is expected to launch this fall with 1100 bikes at 114 stations making it the largest bike sharing deployment in the United States surpasing NiceRide’s 1,000 bicycles.

At CityRyde we have always promoted “critical mass” when deploying bike sharing systems. SmartBike DC’s 120 bicycles was not nearly enough to adequately cover the metro area which is one of the reasons why the system was not as successful as other deployments in cities of similar size. Dublin, Ireland has a similar population to Washington DC, however last year Dublin launched DublinBikes which boasts 450 bicycles and labeled a success.

It will be interesting to see if other cities around the world will scrap their existing systems and choose new vendors. As bike sharing technology advances and more vendors enter the bike sharing marketplace we predict a shift in the way bike sharing systems are financed and deployed.

It’s official.  Nice Ride Minnesota, Bixi and the city of Minneapolis are launching their own bike share program.  This system will be the nation’s first large scale non-profit bike sharing deployment, and this is a pretty big deal in US bike share circles.   The Minneapolis portion of the Twin cities received the necessary key approval by the city council recently, and now it’s safe to say Nice Ride’s dream of having a 3^rd generation bike share system in Minneapolis has been made a reality-the scheme is expected to be available in May 2010.

The pilot system calls for up to 80 solar powered kiosks dispensing up to 1000 bikes.  The kiosks will be centered downtown, uptown, and on the University of Minnesota campus.  According to Nice Ride Minnesota Executive Director, Bill Dossett, the system is designed to promote short rides.  Users can pay an annual fee of $60 ($50 for students) or pay by the ride, and similar to most other 3^rd generation bike share systems, users can unlock bicycles with a key card or credit card.

The project was funded by $1.75 million of the $22 million provided through Minnesota legislation to finance pilot projects that increase non-motorized transportation in Minneapolis and neighboring communities.  The project will also be financed by the $1 million donation from insurance giant Blue Cross Blue Shield, business sponsors, membership fees, and donations from the public.  In fact, CityRyde even contributed to Nice Ride Minnesota earlier in January.

“It’s an enormously huge project,” says Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak.  He hopes the system will entice people to make short trips across downtown for lunch or a meeting, reducing traffic congestion.  Fortunately for Rybak, we think his hope will become a reality judging by past bike share systems success.

As many North American cities are exploring the possibility of bike sharing, Nice Ride’s non-profit model will be of particular interest to the planning committees to see if it can be emulated in other cities.

Dublinbikes, that bike sharing program operated by JCDecaux in Dublin, Ireland, recently announced that it will be expanding the system due to the huge popularity of the system. Dublinbikes launched about a month, after a long wait, to a huge success. According to the Irish Times, more than 16,000 people have signed up for the bike share program making it the most popular city bike scheme to date in Europe. The average usage time for each bicycles is between 16 and 17 minutes.

As we have seen in many popular systems, users have experienced shortages of bicycles at certain locations and shortages of free spaces to return the bicycles at other stations. This is a growing problem of larger systems as they are difficult to manage. Dublinbikes currently has a fleet of 6 trucks driving around the city trying to balance the demand of bicycles. Currently there are 450 bicycles and 50 stations in Dublin’s center. The deployment is one of the first to offer an iPhone application allowing users to see in real time the locations of bicycles and their availability.

This type of rapid expansion is not new to the bike sharing industry. BIXI, the deployment in Montreal, Canada, was forced to expand to Phase II of the deployment quicker then expected because of high demand.

Image courtesy Streetsblog San Francisco

Bike sharing proved quite popular with Californians this past Sunday when the Los Angeles based Brandenburger Foundation, previously discussed here, brought 7 BIXI bikes to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.  Kiosks run by solar panels comprised the stations that accompanied the bikes.  Hundreds of people participated in the demo, generating much excitement about the city’s forthcoming bike share program.

Yet as Demian Bulwa of the San Francisco Chronicle reports, the deployment of the city’s bike share scheme remains stalled, among other reasons, due to a court imposed injunction given that a “local critic argued that some pro-bicycle efforts harm the environment.”  Bike projects throughout the city have been forced into stagnation until the injunction is lifted, the time frame for which is undetermined.  Furthermore, the original 50 bike and 5 station plan proposed by Mayor Gavin Newsom has been criticized as too small; many argue that a larger initial deployment is needed in order for the program to have a noticeable impact.

While the time frame for the deployment of San Francisco bike share remains indeterminate, BIXI representatives continue to visit other West coast cities – including Long Beach, Portland, and San Jose – in an effort to spread the popular bike sharing model across the Pacific.  We’ll have to keep close watch to see will win the race to become the first West Coast US bike share city…

Such optimism is, however, mixed with tones of frustration by some lamenting that Boston’s roads are far from bike friendly.  City mayor Thomas Menino describes them as “old cow paths turned into roads” but, upon hiring Freedman in 2007, has taken steps to improve upon what Bicycling magazine has thrice called one of the worst cycling cities, including the installation of five-foot-wide bike paths.  Furthermore, bikers and drivers alike express worry over the compatibility between congested, trafficky roads made even more difficult to navigate by the addition of bicycles.  Freedman recognizes the need for education to ensure that cyclists and drivers understand the rules of the road so that each can commute safely.

Boston has yet to decide on a vendor for its program but intends to do so within the coming weeks, at which time it will make such information public.  The Department of Transportation’s short list includes BikeNow, a Boston-based company founded in response to the bike share RFP; Veloway, whose parent company Veoila Transportation, runs the city’s MBTA rail; and Public Bike System, which brought BIXI to Montreal.  Regardless of its choice, things are already looking up for Boston bike share as, with Freedman’s improvements, Bicycling magazine changed its tune and in 2008 named Boston a future best city for biking.  Time will tell whether or not that plays out to be true, but we’re all eyes and ears, hopeful that a large-scale program à la BIXI sticks in the US.

BIXI is rolling quickly in both Montreal, elsewhere in Canada, and soon, in the United States.  The program, run by Montreal’s parking authority, Stationnement de Montréal, debuted earlier this summer as North America’s largest third-generation bike-share system and intends to roll out its ambitious phase II in the coming weeks, adding 2,000 bikes and 100 stations to its existing infrastructure.  It has since set up stations in Ottawa and given demonstrations in Vancouver.  Now BIXI looks to the States in an agreement with the Brandenburger Foundation to implement a program in Newport Beach, California.

The Orange County city held bike-share demonstrations this past weekend and continues to monitor how best to structure its system.  Alan Brandenburger, founder of the foundation which bears his namesake, is partnering with BIXI to spearhead the program.  Newport Beach bike-share will include the typical increasing fee structure per time used, and available subscriptions will more than likely comprise 24 day, 30 day, and year-long options.  Because the program is in its infant stages, little else has been reported on Newport Beach, but keep a close eye on the CityRyde blog for updates as we receive them!

In an interesting online editorial entitled Ten Ideas for Improving the BIXI, Francis Cardinal presents the following “pain” and corresponding “solution” in regards to the BIXI bike share program consisting of 500 bikes just recently launched in Montreal, CA:

The Pain – “Travel. A user of the website Twitter told they had to visit nine stations with BIXI before finding one that was not full. Nine.”

The Proposed Solution – “Now review the location and size of stations, in order to optimize the network and reduce potential frustration.”

Great suggestion Francis; one that CityRyde has implemented amongst others in our Fleet Avaliability and Usage Tracking module of Oyster! By meticulously tracking an array of usage datea points Oyster shows 24/7 live and reliable fleet availability to ensure user frustration woes are mitigated and bikes are properly rotated throughout the program.