Yesterday, bike share company B-Cycle stopped in Austin to demo their kiosk style, self-serve bike rental system. Their demo was part of a City of Austin initiative to investigate creating a public bike share program in Austin. Currently, City staff participate in an employee only bike share program, but the 2009 Master Bike Plan calls for a citywide bike share program by 2020.
I stopped by to test ride the B-Cycle fleet bike and had a chance to speak with Jason McDowell, the Projects and Logistics Manager at B-Cycle. The bikes themselves are Trek’s adaptation of the comfy, upright Dutch city bike design with internal gearing, dynamo powered lights, fenders, front rack, and chain guard. The cushy seat uses a quick release to allow virtually all adults to ride and the step through frame allows easy on and off. The integrated front rack includes a built in cable lock for security at stops. McDowell told me that heavier duty U-locks, frame locks, and chains were deemed not necessary as the locking system in the kiosks are much more robust than any standard bike lock.
Unfortunately, the carrying capacity of the bike is limited with only the front rack with 20 pounds so while you might run to lunch on a B-Cycle you are probably not doing grocery shopping on it. My only other gripe is the use of the 3 speed internal hub versus a 7 or 8 speed. While this is a fine setup in flat cities like Chicago (where B-Cycle recently expanded from their start in Denver), the additional range of these higher gear systems is appreciated in hillier terrain. I’m guessing this can be customized depending on what city B-Cycle is operating in.
The coolest part of B-Cycle is their bike kiosks. Topped with the iconic bicycle logo and powered by solar panels, the kiosk has a series of stalls that hold the available bikes. Either swipe your member card or get a $5 day member pass with a credit card on the kiosk, and the stall unlocks making your bike ready to ride. Members get the first 30 minutes free and are then charged a small usage fee after that starting with around $1 for the first hour and up to $65 for the whole day. Helmets are encouraged but not required and are not included for sanitary and safety reasons.
When you are done, you simply return the bike to one of the B-Cycle kiosks and you are done. Unlike traditional car sharing (but similar to Car2Go) you can return the bike to any kiosk, not just the one you checked the bike our from so one way trips are possible.
B-Cycle is currently up and running in Denver with 500 bikes at 50 stations and Chicago with 100 bikes at 6 stations. They are expanding to other communities including San Antonio in the coming months. McDowell said the user base is a mix of people who live in the area using it for errands, commuters using the bikes to get to lunch or an appointment, and tourists who want a bike for the day. Since the barrier to entry is so low at only $5 for the day membership, the system allows people to dip their toe in bicycling for transportation without having to buy a bike.
B-Cycle has also learned from other vehicle sharing programs to build the system for success. McDowell said they only set up B-Cycle in neighborhoods where the density and usage patterns make sense, and they put lots of bikes on the ground with many stations so there is pretty much always a bike available. From my own experience starting up Austin CarShare, this psychology of availability is critical in getting people to buy into the concept of vehicle sharing.
I was impressed with the bikes, their system, and pricing. While I’m not totally sold on the value of bike sharing versus its potential impact at this stage, I’ll admit I’d really enjoy having something like B-Cycle in town and seeing all the bike share bikes on the road.
on Oct 28th, 2010 at 3:16 pm
I’d love to see something like this in Austin as well. I would probably never use it personally as I already commute by bike and run most errands by bike, but it’d be nice to have it here if it was used.
on Oct 28th, 2010 at 3:21 pm
Maybe this is a completely stupid idea, but wouldn’t these bike share kiosk’s be wonderfully effective on a university campus? Don’t get me wrong, I think it would be a great thing for the city to invest in something like this as well, but it just seems to me that universities would really benefit from something like this, especially universities as compact as UT
on Oct 28th, 2010 at 3:35 pm
Minor,
I think you are right however UT is it’s own island, and they are moving towards banning bike on the interior of the campus to make it mostly pedestrian only. My understanding is they are jumping on carsharing though and that Zipcar will be coming soon to UT.
on Oct 29th, 2010 at 12:39 pm
I went to Denver last week and I looked into getting one of these bikes to get around. It actually only makes sense for a limited number/type of scenarios. E.g., you want to get from point A to point B downtown in less time than it takes to walk and less money than a cab. I wanted it to kinda tour around town, get me from my hotel to my convention, to dinner, etc., but it just didn’t make sense, convenience or cost-wise. $65 for a bike rental for a day is INSANE, so that’s not really an option. To get from point A to point B and then maybe to dinner and then back to point B would cost something like $6. Point A and B in my case were about 10 blocks, but I had to walk 2 blocks to get to a kiosk, making walking that much shorter… I dunno, I’m not against the idea, just the execution. I saw people riding them, but they were clearly tourists that didn’t bike very much. Good for them, of course, but I wasn’t really interested. It sounds like a more flexible option than it really is, but I guess more people riding bikes is good. If Austin were to do this (i.e., we’re paying for it), I sure hope they would spend a little more time to improve on the existing model for our city.
And 3 gears would be ok for downtown or the east side, but yeah it would kinda suck to really ride around to South or even central austin.
on Oct 30th, 2010 at 10:45 am
Great post Elliott, thanks for taking the time to research and write.
on Nov 1st, 2010 at 9:21 am
$65 a day?!? Is that a typo?
on Nov 1st, 2010 at 1:00 pm
No, bongobike, that’s not a typo. Vehicle sharing in general is priced this way to incentivize efficient use of the vehicle. Because you are trying to make as many bikes available to as many people as possible, you don’t want people keeping the bike all day. If people get to kiosks and there are never bikes there, the bike share doesn’t work. We did a similar pricing with Austin CarShare. It was very cheap for an hour or 2 but it made no sense for all day (it was $65 as I recall!) If you need a vehicle for longer periods of time, conventional rentals make more sense (which is why we offered specials with regular car rentals.)
Another way to think about it is staying in a hotel versus renting an apartment. If it was the same or cheaper for 30 days to stay in a hotel room, people would do that instead, but there would rarely be rooms for visitor. That’s not the business model of a hotel. Same thing with this.
on Nov 3rd, 2010 at 2:17 pm
$65 for a day rental seems pretty steep at one dollar less than Car2Go and the inconvenience of a very limited number of kiosks. I imagine the operating area would have to be pretty small.
I’d really like to see the Denmark model implemented here rather than these for-profit companies. The bikes are not nearly as comfortable but they’re very practical.
In Copenhagen:
- 2,000 city bikes
- 110 city bike-racks in City
- 1 bicycle repairshop only for city bikes
- 4 mobile city bike-repairshops – for reparations on the spot
http://www.bycyklen.dk/english/thecitybikeandcopenhagen.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_City_Bikes
on Nov 3rd, 2010 at 2:25 pm
kelso,
Again, they don’t want you to take the bike all day. That’s why the price is so steep. If you need a bike for the day, they want you to go elsewhere. On the other hand the first 30 minutes is free and 90 minutes is a little over a dollar. Pretty low price point! The pricing is to incentivize certain use patterns: only using the bike to get from point A to B and then putting it back in the bike share fleet for others to use.
on Nov 3rd, 2010 at 6:08 pm
B-cycle has the right idea in Denver with having 50 racks, I’d say they’d need that many or more to make it work in Austin. Not going big enough right off the bat is a recipe for failure.
I’m familiar with the this type of system and have been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to use them in several different cities. Some systems work better than others. The German Deutsche Bahn ‘call-a-bike’ system is notable because it doesn’t rely on kiosks. It has a similar price structure to B-Cycle but also offer a discounted 24-hour rate.
The problem with kiosks is a lot of the time there simply isn’t one anywhere near point A or point B and even 90 minutes won’t be enough time to run an errand and return the bike to a designated location.
All I’m saying is that if B-Cycle manages to land a contract with the COA only to install a half-assed rental system (like Chicago’s 6 kiosks) we could potentially be setting ourselves back several years in terms of offering a reliable bike share system.
I have to say that none of the profit-based systems I’ve experienced come close to the level of service provided by Denmark’s Bycyklen program. The chances of something like that being installed here are slim to none, but a person can dream.