I went to a show-and-tell demonstration of the BIXI bike share system that will be coming to NYC in the not too distant future. It will be a pilot program, subject to tweaks and adjustments, and will begin in a few logical neighborhoods — the Lower East Side, Williamsburg, the Village etc. It is a system that has already been installed in Montreal, so it’s been road tested. I used it to bike around there the day before Halloween [link to Journal]. As long as one avoids the Royal Mountain it’s a perfectly acceptable city to bike in, though in the middle of winter I think it might be inhumanly freezing. In summer the city is funky and beautiful.
Here’s what the BIXI system looks like and how it works. As in Paris, Barcelona, Lyon and of course Montreal, there are racks of these special bikes (made specifically to fit the racks, with a limited but adequate number of gears and a holder for bags and groceries) spaced around the neighborhoods.
The idea is that you use the bikes for grocery shopping, going out at night, running errands and going to meetings — trips that are usually under a ½ hour. They’re not for day trips to Nyack. You swipe your credit card and you are charged $5 for 24 hours of use. (Or you can subscribe to a monthly or yearly plan, which includes a BIXI key.) After swiping, the machine spits out a ticket with your code to release a bike. You punch in that number at any dock with an available bike, and it releases. I presume that if you don’t return your bike within a 24-hour period the system will assume that you’ve stolen it — and you will be charged accordingly. If you take a long ride there’s an additional fee, but you can take as many short trips in the 24-hour period as you want with no surcharge. One trip and you’ve saved a cab fare; a few trips and you’ve saved the equivalent MetroCard fares.
Yesterday, for example, I biked from my home in midtown to my office in Soho; then, after some meetings there, I picked up some groceries and took them home. Later I went to Joe’s Pub to see Emanuel and the Fear and then up to Terminal 5 to catch Battles. Then home. All of these trips were, I’m pretty sure, under a ½ hour. I have room in my loft for my bike(s) so I normally use my own — but many New Yorkers, and certainly visitors, either don’t have bikes or don’t have room for them in their NY-size apartments. (There is a movement to outfit all new apartments and offices with built-in bike storage space, but that hasn’t happened yet.)
If the stations are as tightly interspersed throughout the city as they are in Paris, one is never more than a couple of blocks from a place to pick up or deposit the bike, so you’d never have to lock it to a No Parking sign or to one of my bike racks. These share bikes do not come with locks — they’re meant to go from station to station, so theoretically there should be no reason to carry your own lock.
How is the bike itself?
They’re fine for what they are. There are chain guards so you don’t get grease all over your nice white pants or dress, and the gear switching mechanism is inside the axle, so no grease there either. In other words, you can wear normal working clothes to ride these, as you would wear the rest of your day. You don’t HAVE to dress like a messenger unless you want to. There are fenders as well, so if there is some wet area or a puddle you won’t get a gray/brown streak of NY street water up your back. The bike I tried seemed sturdy, which made for something a bit heavier than what I would personally choose. The front wheel has a limited turning ability, so no tricks or super sharp turns are possible.
In Montreal and other cities the adoption of these kinds of systems has been rapid — even Parisians take to them. It has relieved a lot of congestion and has probably lowered the carbon footprint of those places as well. I have heard that people have begun to change their habits based on the convenience and availability of these and similar bike systems. Folks don’t have to plan their evenings, for example, based on where or how they can get a taxi or last train home. They also have begun to re-form their mental maps — now free from concerns about heavily trafficked routes, congestion or nearness of subway lines. They have begun to experience their cities in different ways — ways that are more self-organized, improvised and accommodating to change.
