Bike Share, the latest news!

Well, its happening!

Melbourne will have ten Bixi docking stations along the Swanson st. spine from Melbourne University to the Yarra river, all operating by Monday next, May 31st. Later , more to come.

Here’s the bike and the stand which holds it.

Francesca Crocetti reported in The Age, May 13th, that the pre opening trials had got off to a slow start “with only 20 riders hiring the communal bikes in the first week.”

And this was with helmets provided. This means that the real stumbling block has yet to be faced, namely that, come Monday morning, there will be no helmets with those spanking new Bixis, so tempting on the street.

You will have had to bring your own lid, or you’ll be invited to push the bike to some nearby location, presumably indicated on a handy map, where a cheap helmet may be purchased.

When this blog broke the story late last year, the spokeswoman I interviewed, estimated that the helmets at the nearby location could be as low as $15.

Cheap indeed by usual helmet prices, but still many times the cost of the ride, one presumes.

It may be a case of the helmet wagging with bike

This pushing to purchase idea seemed absurd to me then, and still does today. Really, who’s going to wheel a rental bike to some 7/11 to buy a cheap helmet which, presumably, you later throw away?

So expect either a fizzle in Melbourne or lots of drama as some riders defy our helmet law and head off on Bixis bare headed.

The drama potential will be enhanced by the fact most riders will probably be tourists, expecting the cops to go easy on them (see story of the Dutch couple below)

Why tourists? Well, It’s hard to see Bixis appealing be regular Melbournians with their own helmets, because there’ll be just too few bikes (100 in total) for a local to be able to count on them.

With just 100 bikes, how could you rely on finding a Bixi for a regular ride from Flinders st. Station to the Melb. Uni each day, for example?

To be part of the transport system, the bikes have to be ubiquitous. That’s what Montreal found as they built their fleet to 5000 for a city smaller than Melbourne. London is starting with 6000 Bixies.

By the way, I think they should call them Mixis.

That leaves tourists as the most likely riders of the few bikes, especially since many will know and love share bikes from Paris or Barcelona, or now, London.

Having safely ridden bare headed in such cities, some may be particularly stroppy when stopped here.

I can imagine all sorts of entertaining (for the passerby, but not the cops ) rants on how Australia is a nanny state. not trusting adults to think for themselves.

“Even Mexico has repealed it’s helmet law to get bike share, for Chrissake!” (It’s true)

Or maybe the less argumentative will just claim that they were riding to find a helmet, which sounds like a good excuse to me.

When reminded by a testy cop that they are supposed to push the bike to the said helmet outlet, they can sagely reply that, statistically, more pedestrians are killed each year than cyclists, and so they feel safer on the bike

Expect too, that some locals will plan to be caught, aiming to publicize the issue. They’ll have taken a leaf out of Sue Abbott’s book. Here’s one of my early persuavies

Such bush lawyers will be able to bamboozle frustrated officers with many sensible reasons as why they choose to ride bare headed.
They’ll have done their homework in order to have their day in court right there on the street.

They’ll know, for instance, that the safest cities in which to ride a bike are those with the least helmet usage, that true safety is under the wheels and not on the head.

On the other hand. The Montreal Bixi web site is urging Bixi riders to wear helmets, claiming they reduce head injuries by 68% to 88% .

They report that 4 cyclists were killed on Quebec roads last week end (mid may) It’s not specified as to whether they were Bixi riders. There is an urgent need for stats on Bixi’s safety record to date.

In sum, any cop here who wags the stern finger of safety, should be ready for arguments. Indisputably, almost no other country followed the Hawk Govt’s. foolish lead back in ’91, except that is New Zealand

In Brisbane, Dr. Paul Martin, a frequent commenter on this blog blog, (He rides a stately E bike, a Gazelle.) was recently ticketed for riding without a helmet, and he too plans to fight his fine with the aim of drawing attention to the law. Here’s Paul, with his Gazelle.

Paul passed on a touching story which perfectly reveals the inanity of treating adults as children.

A Dutch couple, visitors, rented bikes in a Brisbane park. They refused the proffered helmets most probably because they didn’t use them at home.

A police car on the road outside, spotting the miscreants, raced into the park, sirens screaming, to ticket them. Whether the Dutch were stroppy with the cops, I don’t know.

I do know that the police let down their tires so that the “criminals” would have to push the bikes back to the rental kiosk. They were upset and gave up the idea of bike riding in Brisbane.

The Federal Govt. is currently spending $20 million dollars re-branding Australia as a top tourist destination. How about spending some of that money making sure that those who do come, don’t have such silly experiences?

Speaking of the New Zealand, up till now, I thought that no country with compulsory helmets had managed to set up a Bike share scheme.

So claims a very savvy guy in; Bike Share and Helmets Don’t Mix, and I believed him.

Well, I was wrong. Using a German system called Nextbike, Auckland has a bike share scheme of that name which has been going a couple of years now, and with helmets being compulsory .

How do they manage it? By have a much simpler set up, and being a bit more relaxed about the issue, it seems.

Note the little wire sticking out of the back of the rider’s helmet. That’s part of the story.

Note too, the bike’s not a step through, as most share bikes are. This Nextbike is designed to maximize advertising space, one suspects. It makes for a racy curve, doesn’t it?

In Australia, the law says that a rental helmet has to be inspected and sterilized after each use. Hence the impossibility of clipping one to those Melbourne bikes on the streets next week.

For more on the NZ story, and a great debate about how Nextbike is working, see Unity Finesmith’s great blog ,Auckland Cycle Chic The photos come that blog, by the way.

But here’s a taste of how it works. Firstly, Nextbike has no expensive docking stations.

As manager, Julian Hulls explained to me, that since they can’t access any of the big bucks usually behind such schemes, they can’t afford such docking stations even if they wanted them .

Melbourne is backed by the huge, RACV, for instance.

So, with no money for such infrastructure, Nextbike runs it differently. Each available bike, and I believe there about 170 currently, is locked by cable to a public bike rack or even a railing or post.

Whilst all the big schemes control bike movement through the renter keying in payment and personal info at the docking station, Nextbike invites you to phone in the ID number on the bike you want.

You are then, if a member, given the cable combination number which unlocks both the bike as well as the helmet looped to the lock.

This means that you don’t have to return the bike to an official docking station as you do in Montreal or Paris.

This is real advantages since with those schemes, you can find yourself riding to an appointment and there’s no docking station near your destination, or all of them are chockers with returned bikes.

No, you can leave your Nextbike pretty much where you like, within a wide area that is, as you phone in your finishing time and the location of the bike.

In what seems a big cost burden, Julian tells me that after each rental, the bike is retrieved, moved if necessary to a better spot, and it and the helmet are checked.

Thus, can they say they are renting inspected helmets. The combination , too is changed.

So, perhaps we have to put this scheme in a category all of it’s own. I need to find out more about how Nextbike functions in Germany, its home base.

It certainly seems like an excellent low cost way to start. But how could it possibly work financially if, like Montreal with its Bixi system, you have a million plus rentals over the season? That’s a hell of a lot of chasing around and helmet spraying to do.

I plan to go over to Auckland, early July, to investigate Nextbike more fully. I’m intrigued. It does seem to be the answer for small communities perhaps like Albury, Wagga, Gosford etc.

Considering the visibility Nextbikes have achieved and the good they must be doing in terms of reducing car use, it’s hard top believe that Auckland City Council not only won’t give them a subsidy, but it won’t even sprinkle bike racks around the city to help make Nextbike work better.

I hope that such Pollies, both here and in NZ, when they approach their graves, petrol being $8 a litre, the waves lapping that their respite door, have a Salieri moment, a flash of cleansing honesty as they quaver…..

“Yes, it’s true we didn’t take bikes seriously….. You are right, it was token what we did on my day. Why…..? I guess we didn’t understand.

It’s easy for you young ones now to see how wrong we were, but then the car, the private car, remember those… no, of course you wouldn’t…. well, they were king. They trumped everything”

Mike Rubbo

Tags: Auckland bike share , Auckland city council , auckland cycle chic , Bike share , bike share Melbourne , bixis , cycling in Auckland , Julian Hulls , mandatory helmet laws , Mexica helmet laws , mike rubbo , mixis , Nextbike , sue abbott , Untiy Finessmith