Author: Oliver O'Brien

It’s been announced today that the Alta Bicycle Company will be operating the huge New York City bike-share that will be likely launching next summer. An informative press release reveals the area of the scheme, which will be slightly larger than London’s existing area, but with roughly twice as many bikes in the system and 50% more docking stations, it will have a slightly higher density of available bikes and stations than here in London. The bike and dock design is likely to be very similar to London’s so will be very familiar to anyone visiting from across the pond – it’s also the same system used in Montreal, Washington DC/Arlington, Minneapolis, Boston, Toronto, Ottawa and Melbourne.

Interestingly the system will be financed entirely privately. I’m sure this will be an immense challenge, as London’s capital and operating costs are high. However London has demonstrated that advertising can be a very good deal for the advertiser concerned if the scheme is a success. (London’s planning overhead and so capital expense is also almost certainly higher than New York’s.) The scheme will run 24/365. NYC gets some pretty intense snowstorms in the winter, but so does Washington DC’s scheme, which also runs throughout the year – with occasional suspensions when it gets really bad.

NY will doubtless be looking to London closely, as it probably is the scheme most similar to New York’s – the same technology, roughly the same size and area (all of the US and Canada’s schemes are much smaller) and London’s topography is also quite similar – a major river bisecting the scheme, a single major business district (although London will cover two with next year’s extension to Canary Wharf) with a separate commercial centre, and a very large public park. Doubtless NY will see huge popularity for the bikes in Central Park on weekends, as London does in Hyde Park, and a big morning “commuter surge” from Brooklyn into Lower Manhattan, just like London’s from the Waterloo area to the City.

Interestingly the proposed area extends deep into Brooklyn, but on Manhattan Island it extends only up to 79th Street – roughly a third of the way up Central Park. I would be surprised if, on scheme launch, there aren’t some docking stations in Central Park that don’t in fact go north of this line. New York’s density and road layout structure means there are ample opportunities for the scheme to grow in the future, too.

Two websites have also gone live – Alta’s NYC Bikeshare has some nice mock-up pictures of the bikes (from which I’ve stolen the above pic) + an NYC Dept of Transportation website allows you to pick where you would like to suggest a docking station.

Very pleased to see a link to my bike map from the Alta site. With both big operators in North America (B-Cycle and Alta) being tacitly supportive of third-party maps such as my own – a big constrast to continental Europe – and the station data format likely to be the same, I have high hopes that we will see the plethora of mobile apps, maps and visualisations from the community expand to cover NYC.

N.B. The map above is my own estimate based on the press release boundary mentions. The final scheme on launch will not necessarily match these boundaries.

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.