Melbourne’s Bixi Mystery.

A Newspaper in Montreal, The Gazette, was yesterday (Feb.4th) shouting the good news. Aussies Joining Bixi Empire

The Public Bike System Company, PBSC, the company behind Bixi, has signed two new contracts – one with Minneapolis to supply 1000 Bixi bikes, and another with Melbourne for 610 Bixis.

Bixis are the self help rental bikes which are such a success, both in their hometown, Montreal, and now, it seems, elsewhere.

Indeed, TIME named the bike one of the world’s ten best inventions for 2008, and that was before the Bixi took Montreal by storm last northern summer.

Above, you see some happy Montreal riders, city councillors, I suspect, and below, in yellow green, is the Minneapolis Bixi, coming soon.

That Australia would get a bike share scheme in Melbourne, and that the bike would be the sit -up Bixis, has been known for some time.

But from Montreal and it’s Mayor Gerald Tremblay, come some interesting facts.

The 610 bikes on Melbourne streets will be dispensed from 52 stations which will offer 1000 docking bays, almost twice as many bays as bikes. I guess these extra bays are for expansion, and also to make it easier to find a slot to leave the Bixi when you are done with it.

According to the Montreal Mayor, the bikes are to be on Melb. streets by May this year. Yet a news release by Bicycle Victoria on Jan 13th 2010, put the release date as the middle of next year, 2011.

That’s Mystery number one.

What does seem sure is that the Bixi is becoming the bike of choice for these bike share schemes, and a fantastic earner one imagines for Quebec.

These guys from Rio Tinto/Alcan sure look happy now that they’ve sold 6000 Bixis to London, 2000 to Boston, and now have these Minneapolis and Melbourne sales in hand. Bixi is on a two wheel roll!

It’s sad, if we had developed a utility bike culture in Australia, maybe this success might have come to us, innovative as we are.

But we’ve had no eyes for bikes as transport for many years now. Australia has been obsessed with the racing side of cycling, with bikes as ultra light sports machines, everything the Bixi is not, as you see here.

The Bixi designers traveled the world, and in 18 months built from scratch a fourth generation system, robust and flexible.

Hitherto the Velibs of Paris, some 25,000 of them have held the spotlight, bikes which I still find more elegant than the Bixi.

But whereas the Velibs have been vandalized in huge numbers, the Bixis have not. Is this because the Bixis are stronger, more robust?

Like the Velibs, the Bixi is the classic sit-up bike with basket, enclosed chain, 7 enclosed gears. They sit you so high that you see better and can be seen better.

Bixis create a different dialogue with other traffic. They don’t evoke the road rage, now so commonly vented on the sports cyclist here.
…………..
……………
……………

An inbuilt GPS system allows Bixi Central to track each bike and even lock the brakes if the renter is not returning it at the end of the paid for period. Whether this is true or not is uncertain, something Bixi may not want to advertise.

Canada’s CBC News quoted a student who worked on the bikes, as saying the bikes had GPS chips.

The dispensing stations are also very sophisticated in that they can be quickly set up anywhere with no need for excavations or cabling required for the Velibs. They are solar powered and all data transmission to PBSC is wireless.

Bixis are extremely user friendly. You either take out an annual membership for $78 and use a key to unlock a bike in which case the bike is free for you all day, or you rent it via a credit card which, with a swipe, unlocks the bike to you.

In this case, the first half hour is free and a modest charge builds incrementally after that, up to $5 of the day.

My understanding is that most of the million rentals Bixi did last summer season in Montreal (they took them off the streets during the winter ) were free rides, folks doing half hour dashes around the city.

When PBSC initially rolled out 3000 bikes, the thinking was that mainly tourists would use them, but so popular were they with the locals, that they soon added another 2000 bikes as the season progressed.

Locals took them at their name. Bixi is an abbreviation of bike-Taxi, and so Montrealers used them as personal taxis. What Montreal taxi drivers thought of this, I don’t know.

The Second mystery is really more of a question. Can these Bixis work in Melbourne where the situation will be utterly different?

In Melbourne, some way has to be found to dispense not just a bike, but the compulsory helmet as well .

As an expert explains in my film; Bike Share and helmets don’t Mix? no one has succeeded, as yet, in setting up bike share where there is compulsory helmets.

This is because there is no known way to dispense a sterilized and inspected helmet along with each bike, unless done by hand.

But having staff defeats the ease and economy of the Bixi system, and is way outside the what must be a fragile business model.

The Bike Victoria news release speaks of; innovative folding helmets and vending machines.

As I found out with my film, searching for solution, they are not thinking to recycle helmets as helmets. Helmets might be be broken down and made anew, but not passed from rider to rider.

This leads me to ask;
1. How may riders will be ready to buy a helmet, esp. for a short ride, if they are $15 , as was suggested to me as the target price

2. How accessible will the on-sale helmets be? Will there be a dispensing machine at each docking station, or will, as was also suggested to me, they’ll be sold through 7/11s and McDonalds?

3. If so, how far will one have to push the bike to get a helmet, and what does that do to the free half hour ride one wanted?

4. What will you do with the helmet when done? Is the rider, (bike riders tend to be Green,) going to like the idea of the energy needed to handle and re make the helmets ?

5. How will visitors from countries which do allow choice on helmets, the majority, going to react?

Nothing is forcing them to rent a bike. This helmet business, which may well seem silly to them, and could easily be the deciding factor against using a bike.

This will be especially true if visitors feel that our helmet laws, out of step with the rest of the world, are not cycle friendly, which, sad to say, is true since they lower cycle numbers.

Then, there is the question of the number of bikes on the streets. It may be that the 600 planned for Melbourne are a pilot project. But you can’t run a pilot project without a plane which flies.

Unless there are enough bikes for the scheme to work in a near optimum way, the scheme can’t prove itself.

One can imagine 600 bikes meeting tourist needs, folks with no urgent agendas to follow . Here’s my friend, James, who writes that great blog The Urban Country being a tourist on a Montreal Bixi last summer.

But the local user has different needs. Following the Taxi analogy, these users need bikes fast and reliably, to get to a meeting or a maybe lecture at Uni.

The Bixis have to be available in such numbers that one can find one almost all the time. In Montreal, the stations are almost always in line of sight.

Secondly, the renter needs to be able to get rid of the bike equally fast when he/she gets to his appointment or to class.

Imagine in Melbourne with only 50 docking stations, the dramas which might arise.

You’ve nabbed a bike for what you planned as a half hour ride to an urgent appointment, and now you cant get rid of it. There’s no docking station where you need to leave it, or they are all full.

What do you do? The bike have no independent lock. So, either you carry your own lock, locking it to some post till after class, later paying the extra rental, or you carry the bike into your meeting and also pay later.

That only has to happen once for you revert to more reliable transport like your own bike, taxi, or public transport.

The helmet, that’s another problem. If you do find Bixis readily available and convenient, then you might carry a helmet with you.

But if there are any doubts, you wont, and to experiment with the system, you are going to have to buy a helmet and lug it around afterwards

Just as nature abhors the vacuum, nature also abhors unnecessary complications, which is why I can’t see this scheme working with the hassle of the helmet.

Vancouver was supposed to have bike share in time for the Winter Olympics. No bike share has appeared and the word is that helmets, they also make them compulsory, were the problem.

Tel Aviv is ready to bite the Bullet, I’m told. They brought in compulsory helmets quite recently but now, with 1500 bikes ready for the streets, and no helmet solution, the Israelis are thinking of rescinding their new law.

Moreover, as more and more cities prove that you can run bike share schemes without a nasty increase in head injuries, our insistence that we are somehow dumber, our heads more fragile than anyone else, is going to seem more and more silly.

I’ve suggested a workable compromise to what promises to tie bike share in knots.

Namely that all sit-up bike riders be allowed to exercise choice as to wear helmets or not. the choice which they have almost everywhere else, one might add.

This frees schemes like Bixi, which are all sit-up, to take hold to expand and thrive, and at the same time it favors the sort of bike most likely to grow utility cycling in this country, the stately Sit-up

……………
The sit-up is a very different bike . Look at this Peugeot beauty. We see bikes everyday but few with the elegance, the grace, of this bike .

Is it not obvious that such bikes could be in another category as they arrange their riders in postures never seen on Australian bikes?
………..

Are you desperate to see a helmet on this rider? I think not.

Do not our streets deserve to be so adorned? and for the pedestrian, what would the impact be to meet such bicycle beauty at the traffic lights?

“I’d like to be doing that!” many would think, is my guess.

Surely this bike and rider from Copenhagen Cycle chic riding a Velorbis, I suspect, that’s a famous Danish Sit-up Bike, is more inviting to the non rider than our women cyclists below.

These riders, pushing hard in their lycra, are no doubt fit and happy, but speak from a world apart.

They don’t help us get the average young woman out of her Getz and onto a bike for those many short trips she makes

And the Hon. Tony Abbott, he sets a good example, but does not attract the non rider. Wouldn’t you agree Mr Abbott?

A helmet exemption for sit up riders could have far ranging effects, all good, I suggest. At the moment we have in Australia what amounts to a mono cycle culture. .

We are apparently third in the world in sports cycling, the mono culture, but in utility cycling, the orphan culture, we are near last.

Here’s the cover of Australian Cyclist, the dominant image the dominant message.

Our tiny utility bike world needs to be nurtured, as my suggestion would do, given special treatment to help it grow by favoring the Sit -Up

In this article in the Melb. Age Dr.Garry Glazebrook is reported as suggesting that those who ride on green-ways be exempted from helmet use.

But such bike paths are rare. Moreover, what do you do when you come to the end of a green-way and have to join the normal road system, pull out the helmet you’re thus forced to lug around? It would be a strange, on and off situation, I fear

With these suggestions to enhance utility cycling, the good thing is that it does not have to be; an either or when it comes to sit up and road bikes

As Dr. Ian Charlton explains in the second half of his video, he loves his racing bike for weekend rides, but come Monday morning, he’s doing his doctors rounds on a sit up.

Related to that, such a helmet compromise could seed the emergence of a powerful new lobby, pushing for bike-ways like the super path in Brisbane.

These have separated paths been proven time and again to be the best way to make people, feel safe on bikes. With Sit -ups, helmet free, a new lobby group can form, to push for such paths more urgently.

Bicycle Victoria and Bicycle NSW have been a doing a heroic job in promoting cycle paths of various sorts, but they need help from a new public on bikes, such as favoring sit-ups could bring

I suspect that we lag with bike-ways because the sports cyclists, the dominant breed, don’t particularly want or need separate paths, clogged as are, with slower riders.

They are happy riding the roads, as they do now, going as always for their PB’s, their personal bests.

But the sit-up rider dreams of little else than a sweet separation from heavy traffic

With new sit-up lobbyists at work, our Governments will no longer be able to shove the responsibility for safety onto the heads of the riders, as they’ve done till now.

True cycle safety is under the wheels not on the head.

The  scheme in Minneapolis and St Paul, the twin cities, is set up by a non profit organization with the great name of Nice Ride Minnesota and is the first large public bike scheme in the US.>

The driving force is Bill Dossett, Executive director of Nice Ride Minnesota.

We wish them luck as we do Melbourne too of course