Month: July 2011

I was in the Loire region of France last week for a holiday. Unusually for me, a “proper” holiday – no international orienteering racing or mountaineering. Instead, a chance to be a real tourist, visit les châteaux and try a bit of the local grape-based drinks.

…but France is rather advanced when it comes to bike sharing systems and I came across three of them:

Tours – Velociti

A traditional free-floating scheme rather than a dock-based one – members take one of the bright yellow bikes (below) and then lock it up whereever, when they are finished. I didn’t see anyone using them, but did spot them locked up in a few places, including one outside the train station and a few in a quiet square in the town.

Angers – Velocite+

Angers has apparently had a free-floating one for a long while, called Velocite – I didn’t spot any of these. But I did spot this seemingly brand new extension – Velocite+. There is only one (very large) docking station, right outside the train station. The docking station had Every dock was taken with a bike – presumably if there is only one docking station in a scheme, this is not a problem. The fee (effectively three euros for up to five hours) means people could feasibly hire one out at lunchtime and use it several times in an afternoon, before returning it back to the single docking station, rather than make short station-to-station hops. No sign of it being used yet.

Angers has also just launched its rather innovative tram – in the historic central section it uses radio-activated sections of electric third-rail, rather than unsightly overhead wires and gantries.

Paris – Velib

On the way back home, I had a day in Paris, and what better way around than by Velib? After spending much of the day around the canal area in the north-east and Sacre-Coeur, I headed into the centre (during the evening rush hour), then around to the Louvre, Notre Dame, and back up to Gare du Nord.

I managed eight journeys in all, and even got the bonus 15-minute credit for having dropped off a bike on the hill near Sacre-Coeur.

You can see the pics from my trip in this Flickr gallery or here:

I was in Prague at the end of last month for the final OBIS Project meeting. OBIS was a multi-year European Commission project to study and document bike sharing systems in 10 countries in the European Union.

The project’s handbook was presented at the conference, and there were a number of talks from various cities on their own schemes, as well as some external speakers. I found the Barcelona one, given by the operator, particularly interesting – it focused on the difficulties they have with redistributing enough bikes to a densely populated part of the city with narrow streets. By switching to a hub-and-spoke model, they were able to significantly improve the effectiveness. London was covered by the CTC (Cyclists Touring Club) who presented on Transport for London’s behalf. The project actually covered the UK before London’s Barclays Cycle Hire launched, so focused on the smaller schemes in, for example, Cardiff and Blackpool. However London did make it into the final handbook. Stockholm’s presentation touched on the logistical and political issues there, particularly as regards finding space for docking stations – their scheme is therefore still at just 50% of its planned size/density.

Other sessions had insights into the differences between station-based systems and “leave whereever” schemes. The old Berlin system, which is just being switched to station-based docking, used to allow bikes to be left at any crossroads in the scheme area – fine in principal but Berlin has a very large number of crossroads.

As an external speaker, I presented on visualising bike shares around Europe and throughout the world, mentioning my own Bike Share Map as well as introducing some more complex work being carried out by others in the research lab here. I also went into detail on the excellent range of data available for the Capital Bikeshare in Washington DC, and touched on Hangzhou’s huge system, and London’s new official API. A slide from the presentation is above, I’m not posting the whole presentation yet though as it contains some forthcoming work from others here.

The session that launched the handbook outlined some interesting insights from it. It is useful to class European cities as “warm” or “cold” (p31 of the report.) Warm cities generally have two peaks in bike share usage a year – spring and autumn – it being too hot in the summer for mass usage. Cold cities peak in the summer, and often drop off completely in the winter and snow and ice takes over.

European countries were also categorised according to the cycling culture there – it is probably fair to place Germany in the top category, but I was somewhat surprised to see France in the middle one and the UK in the bottom one. Cycling in London has improved a lot over the last few years – even if transport planners insist in putting the cycle lanes on the roads and not the pavements – in fact I spent most of yesterday cycling in Paris – blog post to follow – and felt there were fewer (non-Velib) cyclists around than in London. Talking of Paris’s Velib, one tidbit I didn’t know about until I read through the handbook (p.61) was that the operators in Paris run a barge (!) up and down the Seine, on which they fix Velib bikes and at the same time transport them to where they are most needed. Kind of like a French version of the Travelling Post Office.

Prague doesn’t have its own full scale bike share system (yet) and the “modal share” of cycling is much less in Prague than in many other European capitals. There is a very small trial bike share in the city, I didn’t spot it. There were hardly any bikes on the streets, at least in the central part of the city I saw, although the route along the riverbank was reasonably popular when I passed and has a dedicated cycle path. There is one thing better than London though. A photo of the riverside route is below – if this were London, the bollards would be in the cycle path rather than in the pedestrian lane.

You can download the OBIS handbook from the offfical website.

Following on from my previous post – another reason I was particularly pleased to be in Vienna for State of the Map EU, was that Vienna has a bike share system! CityBikes has been around since 2003, it is run by JC Decaux, a commercial operator, but the scheme’s running data is controlled by the city authorities, hence I’m able to include on my Bike Share Map. Obviously I had to have a go, particularly as the scheme is open to tourists with a credit card, and is only 1 euro for as many journeys as you need over 24 hours ever – as long as each journey is less than an hour.

Vienna’s scheme is quite a bit smaller than London’s – it’s spread over a similarly sized area, but the density of stations is much lower (around 20% of London’s), so some advance planning is needed – you don’t generally just come across a stand. Redistribution also seems to be less frequent – for example my local stand remained nearly empty through for the course of the entire trip. Nonetheless I was able to make all three planned trips on the CityBikes, a 100% success rate which London’s disconnected docks and failing keys can’t match.

On the Thursday evening that we arrived, Steve and I borrowed a couple of bikes from a stand right outside the U-Bahn station on the Nachtmarkt and used them to get to the pre-conference drinks which were a couple of miles away to the north. Sign-up took ages – requiring numerous button presses and a password to be entered three times. The paper map in the stand dispenser proved to be quite handy though. We eventually got onto the fantastic, dedicated cycleways which are sensibly built on the pavements rather than the roads in Vienna, and clearly and regularly marked with blue and white cycle roundels on the ground, where errant pedestrians are more likely to look. Vienna’s streets are generally wider than London’s, allowing for such facilities – plus the narrower ones are generally one-way for cars and two-way for bikes. We accidentally headed straight into the old town rather than along the outer ring-road, but then joined the inner ring-road and had a spectacular cycle past the Museum Quarter, Parliament and City Hall. Another missed turn meant we ended up cycling three sides of a square, but we made it eventually and docked with no problems. Our return was similarly indirect – the first stand was empty, then after getting the bikes, we took an unscheduled right turn and discovered that Vienna does in fact have hills. Steve’s bike also proved to be less than road worthy, with the chain slipping and the back wheel wobbling and threatening to come off…

It turns out that there are two generations of bikes currently in use in the system. The newer ones are noticeable in that they have three gears rather than none – geared higher than London’s scheme, allowing some decent speed to be gained. They also have more comfortable handlebars, rotary bells, differently profiled rear lights and strobe front lights. The frame is also slightly different, with a lower support to the back wheel. The gears alone mean there is a considerable advantage in getting one of the new ones. In the photo at the top, the bike on the left and the furthest one on the right are the new generation bikes, while the other four are older. There are also at least four liveries on the bikes across both generations – grey/red, blue, yellow and purple.

The bikes feel heavier than London’s (if that were possible!) and because of the low dip in the middle of the frame, they tend to want to fall over a lot when you stop to look at a map and stand up. Thankfully this is OK as, in Vienna, you are generally on the cycle paths on the pavements, and not the roads themselves.

“Hot docking” – cycling straight into the dock point (a favourite of London commuters) – is just about possible, but more difficult to do than London’s – you need to approach from the left side and line up confidently. Nevertheless we had a go.

Our final trip was more ambitious – four of us OSMers headed right through the old city, past the cathedral, and eventually into the more commercial part of the city, then underneath the huge Praterstern station and right up to the Danube. Here, there is a dedicated cycle track underneath the road bridge. The bridge is however quite a way beyond the area of docking stations, so the other cyclists around were on more serious bikes.

It took us quite a way to get out here – over an hour, but that only resulted in an extra 1 euro charge. On the way back, it started raining as we passed under Praterstern, luckily this was as we passed a large dock, so we finished our return on the U-Bahn.

The website for Boston’s Hubway bike share launched today. No map of docking stations yet, but it is coming… [Update – map is here and the scheme launches on 26 July.]

The bike share is due to launch at the end of the month and will seem quite familiar to anyone visiting from London (or Toronto or Washington DC) – it’s being run by the same company that designed the system used over here – Alta Bike Share, aka BIXI. Like London, the bikes will have three gears and flashing indicator lights. Pricing is $5 a day (or $60 a year) and then free for each journey under 30 minutes. Only the annual option has a key, daily users need to always use credit cards and print out access codes. The pricing increment for long journeys (over 90 minutes) increases very aggressively, so you really don’t want to do what a lot of Londoners do at the weekend, that is take the bike to your local park for a long picnic and keep it with you for the duration.

The helmet policy is interesting – unlike London where there was no mention of using/not using helmets, here in Boston they are saying that helmets should be worn, even if local laws don’t make it mandatory. Presumably this is to disclaim liability, line up with current local politics, or sponsor requirements.

Talking of sponsors, Boston’s Hubway is one of the few schemes to have a major “title” sponsor, in this case New Balance. There are immediate and obvious synergies with New Balance, a sportswear manufacturer, sponsoring a mode of transport that many see as a leisure activity as well as a utility or commuting tool. Certainly more obvious than Barclays, a bank, that is the title sponsor here in London.

Might we have a Nike scheme in a city soon? Is the Adidas Oxford Bike Share around the corner? You heard it here first! (I have no knowledge of any forthcoming bike shares in other UK cities, apart from the current Bath trial, but Oxford’s strange shape would be eminently suited to bike share if only everybody didn’t already have a bike.)