The new Social Bicycle System, SoBi, brings a whole new aspect to bike sharing by eliminating the idea of a station only systems. Users can now dock bicycles on any regular bike rack within the restricted riding area. This revolutionary system is made possible by the bicycles attached lock system and built in GPS.

The system depends only on these regular bicycles with the attached lock systems. Since specially designed bicycles aren’t needed, bicycle-sharing programs can save thousands of dollars. This will make these systems more cost efficient and manageable.

After an interview with the founder, Ryan Rzepecki (previously an Urban Planner for the New York Dept. of Transportation), we got some insight into his SoBi idea. He mentions that bicycles will be set under a restricted riding area so no user can ride off with the bicycle to places other people can’t reach easily. There also will be stations in high use areas, where SoBi bicycles will always be in abundance. Users can sign up online, via mobile application, or call the SoBi service line. All of his ideas seem to support realistic situations and make this system very viable for new bike-sharing programs.

A test trial will be conducted soon in New York City on a small scale system containing 20-25 bicycles.  The flaws of the system will be identified in this test trial and an improved system will come out of the results.  Check out Ryan’s video for more information:

The Social Bicycle System from Ryan Rzepecki on Vimeo.

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.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUptaQfTLUw

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WilPTU1vc_U

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUmTFMJa7Jw

CityRyde would like to call our readers, followers, etc. to action to support our friend over at World Streets – Mr. Eric Britton – who’s outfit is often times considered the voice of sustainable transportation. For the few of you that may be unaware, here is the World Streets mission.

Mr. Britton states, “After five-plus months of proving its worth day after day, bringing carefully selected news, expert views, comments and leads to the desks of more than sixty thousand visitors from more than forty countries on all continents, World Streets is now reaching out to get active subscriber support. We will need your help to continue…”

As an advocate we encourage you to check out the World Streets website and either subscribe, support or get involved with their efforts as doing so will surely be win-win.

UC Irvine approached Central Specialties Limited, a manufacturer of stroller venders, in May of 2008 about the possibility of modifying its vending components to meet the University’s desired bike share system specifications.  The result: an intelligent third generation design that has already won an award for Innovation and Collaboration from the McHenry County (of Illinois) Economic Development Corporation’s Business Accelerator Program.

Four centrally located stations equipped with solar powered kiosks will be placed in heavily trafficked areas of the Irvine campus.  Students, faculty, and staff will be able to apply online for membership, after which time they will receive a bike lock and membership card that grants them electronic access to the program’s bicycles.  The bikes themselves will be cruiser style and painted to reflect the school’s colors.  We heartily applaud UC Irvine for its dedicated efforts to bring sustainable transportation practices to its campus, anxiously await ZotWheels’ release, and sincerely hope that other universities will follow in its footsteps!  In the meantime, learn more about ZotWheels here.

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…

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!

Wheels4Wellnes has drawn sharp criticism from Republican representative Jack Kingston of Georgia, who recently proposed an amendment to slash the program from the fiscal year 2010 budget.  Kingston laments the $200,000 in taxpayer dollars that the program initially cost to purchase the 30 bicycles.  He also complains that the bicycles are made available from only 8am to 5pm, when congressmen should be at work.  Furthermore, he gripes that the House website gives no clear indication of how to sign up for the program, citing his struggle of being re-directed to many offices simply to sign out a bike key.  Kingston argues that the key is in itself a huge problem, forcing congressmen to make two special trips just to use to bike, once for key pickup and once for key drop-off, all by 5pm.  The congressman posted a critical YouTube video outlining his concerns.  Congress has agreed to cut funding by half (to $100,000), and requires that the CAO review the program and transfer funds to other employee benefit programs if it finds that the bikes continue to collect dust.

In all likelihood, Wheels4Wellness will collapse – and rightly so, for a multitude of reasons.  First is the issue of funding.  $200,000 is an overwhelming amount of money for 30 little-used bicycles, averaging roughly $6,700 per bike.  Even the most high-tech bike-share programs spend only $4,000 per bike, and that’s a total average cost factoring in funds for automatic check-in/out kiosks, something that Wheels4Wellness doesn’t have.  Second, the CAO program’s funds are provided by hardworking taxpayers for congressional benefit; where the incentive is to provide that money proves difficult to find, as it is by no means certain that a biking congressman is more productive than a driving or transit-riding one.  Keep in mind, too, that congressional staff are given DC Metro cards as part of their overall benefit package.

The third reason is perhaps the most obvious.  With the SmartBike DC program proving a relative success since its initial rollout phase last summer, why not use those existing infrastructure models and expand to the Hill?  As noted in an earlier post, SmartBike is currently facing a roadblock with Clear Channel regarding the latter’s agreement to provide funding for expansion, yet if that obstacle is cleared, Capitol Hill seems a logical place to start.  However, even pending a lengthy (and arguably inevitable) continuation of this bureaucratic hold-up that is so characteristic of all things Washington, Wheels4Wellness ought to be scrapped.  The 175 users who took advantage of the program can, like Kingston, pay for their own bicycle transportation.  In the meantime Washington should continue to explore SmartBike expansion and other ways to include the whole of the DC biking community, rather than provide yet another taxpayer-funded perk to the isolated congressional lot high on the Hill.

One of Portland's bike boxes, part of the city's efforts to avoid bike and car collisions

Portland, OR, considered the second-most bike friendly city in the world is once again in the market for a bike-share system.  Though the city is not new to bike-sharing, it has yet to implement a successful program.  Portland spearheaded the launch of a first generation program in the mid 1990s that ultimately failed, like many others of its kind, due to theft and vandalism.  The city also solicited vendor proposals in its early 2007 RFI for a more technologically-based program, but ultimately decided against the project in the summer of 2008 due to inadequate information and funding concerns.

Now that Portland Mayor Sam Adams’ Chief of Staff Tom Miller is rife with bike-sharing information from Lyon and Stockholm, having explored those respective models on recent business trips, the city is looking for a fresher, more informed exploration of implementing a third- or possibly even fourth-generation system.  Yet Miller admits to unease with proceeding without the most accurate knowledge of current programs worldwide, noting “we’re not yet sure we know what getting it right entails.”  To help further refine its knowledge, Portland has invited all interested vendors to display and present their bike-sharing systems at two separate demonstrations in mid-August.

Lack of information is, however, a problem far more easily rectified than some of the city’s other chief concerns.  Most prominent is the question of expense: where would the millions of dollars required to successfully deploy a manageable number of bicycles come from?  Miller is careful to note the city’s aversion to the advertising model that SmartBike DC and Paris’s Velib have employed: “Our local culture’s distaste for private advertising in the public right of way means our program would likely need to be funded with taxpayer dollars … if we had a funding model that didn’t require public dollars, we know Portlanders would overwhelmingly support a grand bike share experiment and we would likely move quickly.  But with limited public dollars to address daunting public needs we will move carefully on bike share.”  His concern resonates closely with that of Boulder, CO, where strict advertising laws make the DC and Paris model inapplicable.

Though such a gift as Denver received to start its bike-share program – $1M from the Democratic Party as a thank-you for hosting its 2008 national convention – seems unlikely, Portland appears far more organized to strategically consider all facets of a world-class bike-share program, including its funding.  Though it hasn’t off-written the idea of using taxpayer dollars to support its program, such a funding scheme is likely to face opposition, as many Portland bloggers gripe.  But like all carefully delineated business plans, Portland will leave that for now and consider first steps first, concentrating on information acquisition at the August demonstrations.  Public hearings will be scheduled subsequent to the demos, after which time City Council will vote on whether or note it is in the city’s best interests to proceed further.