Try out a public bike share system in Vancouver this weekend!
June 11, 2009
Try out a public bike share system in Vancouver this weekend!
June 11, 2009
Drop by Science World this weekend and try out a public bike share system!
The City of Vancouver will be demonstrating a self-serve rental station for bikes. Bring a helmet if you want to ride!
The station is actually from Bixi, the City of Montreal’s award-winning public bike share system. Trying it out and getting feedback is the City of Vancouver’s first step in exploring how to implement such a system here.
The details:
Friday, June 12 to Monday, June 15
Where: Seawall area south of Science World
When: 7am to 7pm (June 12 and 15)
10am to 4pm (June 13 and 14)
And you can find out lots more at the City of Vancouver’s site.
A great feature of this program is that you can return the bicycle to any station. Say I would get off the West Coast Express, get a bicycle, ride to a station near my work, return it. Likewise for going home, going shopping, going anywhere! I really see this program taking off in Vancouver.
I agree, this would be a great program to have in town. I tried this out last year when backpacking in Vienna, Austria, and was great! You could borrow a bike for trips up to an hour in length for free and only start paying for any time after that. As a tourist it was a great way to see the city faster and on the cheap.
I’d really like to see BIXI in Vancouver, but this won’t go anywhere until the province removes the mandatory helmet law.
I just came back from trying out the bicycles… very cool! They’re very easy to ride like a cruiser, I totally see this taking off in Vancouver.
I agree we need to do one of two things:
1.) Scrap the helmet law and instead have a waiver that any cyclists suffering from head injuries and not wearing a helmet will not have their medical expenses covered by MSP, nor will the City of Vancouver or Bixi be liable.
2.) Include a helmet rental system with the bikes.
It was easy enough to carry a helmet with me today, they’re feather light but just really bulky.
I had an opportunity to visit Paris last year – they have an AMAZING public bike system there called “Velib” which has absolutely taken off. Almost everywhere you look you see Velib bikes riding around, much more so than any other type of bike.
Velib has worked out such that you see business men in suits, women in dresses, lots of people who don’t look like your typical cyclist. It isn’t a “spandex” kind of thing.
Along with that you see an almost total absence of helmets. Can you imagine seeing M. Businessman wearing a helmet over his carefully styled hair?
Vain? Sure… But reality is what it is and trying to pretend anything else is just foolish.
The problem with ideas like helmet rentals is bike helmets are so fragile – most typical low cost bike helmets are supposed to be thrown away after rough handling (IE if you drop your helmet it is no longer ‘certified’ to protect you). You really need to get in to more heavy-duty helmets like the ones worn by pro skateboarders and the like if you want something that can survive being checked out by multiple different people in a day.
The idea of carrying a helmet also kind of goes against the public bicycle. The idea isn’t that you planned to take a bike – yes, it’s something you CAN plan ahead to do, but what makes a program like Velib in Paris so successful is the “spur of the moment” thing – the fact you can be out with some friends and suddenly say “Hey, let’s go to the beach, we can grab some bikes!”
Just do a Google Image search for “Velib” and see how many helmets you see…
And remember, someone who sits in a car pumping out poisons all day while getting fat is not exactly easy on the medical system either. To the comment above about waiving medical claims, I’d like to see the same thing for people who eat at KFC!
But most bike rental stores rent out helmets anyway. They could somehow implement this.
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