Melbourne's helmet vending machines

Photo source: article by J Williams

Melbourne has just launched a 3 month trial of a helmet vending machine at two of their bike share station. It is hoped that this will allow more people to use the scheme on a whim. Lets hope this is successful in attracting more people to the scheme. More details can be found here in an article and video by The Age. At a cost of $5 with $3 refund on return to a 7-Eleven they are a bargain. I suspect the vending machines will be the source of helmets for more than just the users of the bike share scheme. Not a bad thing in itself.

Since May the scheme has been used for 20,700 trips. That equates to less than 175 trips per day. They are doing a bit of a marketing push to get more users on the bikes in spring, giving away a $1,000 resort voucher for people joining the scheme.

The scheme is far more focused on casual users than Brisbane's as can be seen in their pricing and the ability to sign up using your credit card at a vending machine. To use Brisbane's scheme on a whim you have to plan at least a week in advance and sign up via the Internet, eventually getting your card after a week or so. Once you have the card you can have daily use at any time. The cost of daily hire and the forward planning required makes it very unattractive for occasional users and largely inaccessible to tourists. I assume this was intentional so as not to impinge on existing bicycle hire businesses aimed at the tourist trade.

	Daily	Weekly
Brisbane CityCycle	$11	Not available
Melbourne Bikeshare	$2.50	$8

It will be interesting comparing the two schemes after a year to see which model has been most successful in attracting users, and what the user profile is.

CityCycle dreaming

I dreamed the other night that I hired one a CityCycle bike to go to a lunch appointment in the West End. It was great except there was no parking when I got there. The restaurant had hidden the cycle racks under some tables. So How very disappointing. Lets hope that does not happen in reality. It would seem highly unlikely considering the number of docking stations being rolled out all over the city and West End. See the map here.

It is exciting seeing all the cycle hire stations getting the finishing touches around the city. I was so excited I asked our 'green team' at work whether the company were going to take out corporate membership of CityCycle. The response was disappointing, but not surprising - the health and safety policy would not allow it because the risks are just too high. Experienced cyclists are encouraged to use the scheme but the lack of safe cycling facilities in the CBD means the risk for inexperienced cyclists is too great.

I suspect many company health and safety committees will come to the same conclusion. It will take a lot to change the perception that cycling is dangerous. Interesting statistics from the Netherlands is that walking is actually more dangerous than cycling. The fatality rate for pedestrians is far higher (per billion kilometers travelled) than cycling is. And both are more dangerous than driving, being above the average for all modes. Here are the numbers for the years 1999-2003.

Pedestrians 32 deaths/billion km
Cyclists 14 deaths/billion km
Car drivers 4 deaths/billion km
All modes 6 deaths/billion km

From these statistics it would appear advisable for health and safety committeesto advise people against walking and cycling and encourage people to drive more. But public transport is even safer as these statistics from the UK show. Interesting to see how much safer it is for cyclists and pedestrians in the Netherlands.

Passenger death rates per billion passenger kilometres
	1993	1997	2001	2002
Motorcycle	106.0	119.0	112.3	111.3
Walk	70.1	57.6	47.7	44.8
Bicycle	46.5	44.9	32.7	29.5
Car	3.2	3.1	2.9	2.8
Van	1.6	1.0	0.9	1.0
Bus or coach	0.7	0.3	0.2	0.4
Rail2	0.4	0.5	0.2	0.3
Water3	0.0	0.0	0.4	0.0
Air3	0.0	0.0	0.0	0.0

Bike share around the world

Construction of Brisbane's CityCycle bicycle share/hire scheme has started. The number of stations where you can hire a bike is quite staggering and will make the scheme very useful to get around the centre of Brisbane. The map below comes from the BCC web site.

CityCycle will bring Brisbane alongside the hundreds of other cities worldwide with bike sharing systems. The Bike-sharing Blog is a fantastic record of how these systems are being rolled out worldwide. The blog has a fantastic Google map that illustrates how the bike sharing revolution is being rolled out all over the world and provides links to the web-sites for each of the different schemes.

Bribane bike hire

Brisbane has called for tenders for the construction of the first 150 bicycle hire parking stations as reported in the Brisbane Times. Councillor Sutton has a valid question as to where cyclists will be able to ride. The paucity of safe cycle facilities in the CBD and Fortitude Valley is a major deterrent to potential cyclists, not to mention the need to wear a helmet.

There is huge potential for providing cycleways similar to the one in George Street on several of our city streets. Elizabeth Street and the lower end of Queen Street would make a great link across the CBD, a safe shortcut across the city. Linking to the pathways along the river would need some clever planning.
Linking the new cycle centre in Roma Street to Albert Street through the Mall would be good but the number of pedestrians would make it difficult to safely cycle through the mall. The Malls Act prevents cyclists using this section - a huge pity. The taxi parking would need to be moved to make this possible.
Continuing the cycleway along George Street would be fantastic but would need some clever traffic management and the poor taxis will get moved on again.

These are just idle ramblings on a Sunday afternoon. Anyone else out there with dreams for a network of cycleways through the city?

Brisbane Cycle Centre

The Brisbane City Council has undertaken an assessment of the performance of the Cycle Centre located in the King George Square Bus Station. The assessment included a survey of current users of the facility. They have not published the report on-line but the Brisbane Times has a good article on it.

The Cycle Centre is owned by the Council but operated by Cycle2City. The photos are from their web site where they also have a video tour of the facility.

The main concern of the report is the slow growth in membership. At the time the research was done (June 2009) the centre was only at 50% capacity of the 420 spaces available. I popped in there a week ago to get stuff from the cycle workshop and they said they were around 75% full now. For the first week back after New Year I was impressed by how busy it was.Some of the reasons cited for the slow growth in membership were

• location: the centre is far from the main business centre of the city and around a third of members have to walk or catch a bus over 800m from the centre to their places of employment. Including a second Cycle Centre as part of a future Cross River Rail station in the Riverside precinct would be good. Although the Roma Street precinct is set rapidly growing the new buildings are all most likely to have their own cycle facilities for staff and so the need for the centre is reduced.
• Fee structure: At $4 a day for a 6 month membership or $8 for casual use ($5 to just park the bike) the cost puts many off using the facility. Reading the comments at the end of the article are interesting as cost seems to be the main reason many don't use the facility. Yet current users are happy that the cost is less than public transport and includes secure parking, a locker, shower and towel it is too expensive for many.
  
• Marketing: The report highlights poor marketing as a reason for the slow growth and the managers admit they took time to realise people would not just walk in the door. From a discussion with the manager six months ago I learned that one of their big marketing coups was approaching businesses instead of individuals. Approaching business without their own cycle facilities to buy memberships for their staff brought in quite a few new memberships. Businesses wanting better 'green' credentials but constrained by their facilities were willing to buy into this. Being located in an older part of the city where most buildings don't have end of trip facilities for cyclists would be good.

The Cycle Centre may have taken a bit of time to get going but I would hesitate to call it a white elephant (one of the comments on the news article). Although growth in membership may be slow there is further growth potential as the Roma Street precinct grows and improved cycle facilities are provided through the city. Within 5 years there will probably be a need for a second Cycle Centre in the city.

Brisbane's second Cycle Centre has now opened at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital busway station serving a very different market. It will be interesting to see how it performs over the next 12 months.

Active transport news from Brisbane

PBT held a seminar on 18 June where the Brisbane City Council provided an update on their Active Transport Program.

Bryony Chapman, Project Manager for the CityCycle project gave an excellent presentation on the City's bicycle hire scheme. Lyndal Peters, the team leader for Travel Behaviour Change gave a presentation on the program and Stephanie Edwards, a program officer for cyclist and pedestrian mobility, gave an update on the progress of the Bikeways investment program. Unfortunately I cannot include the presentations but here are some highlights from the presentation on the CityCycle scheme.

The picture above shows an artists impression of what a CityCycle bicycle hire station may look like. The BCC web site provides some background information on the scheme. The successful tenderer providing the Brisbane scheme is JCDecaux. You can read about their Cyclocity bike hire stations here.

The target for implementing the scheme is to have up to 1,500 bikes and 81 bike hire stations in the CBD and Fortitude Valley by mid 2010. By mid 2011 a further 500 bikes would be rolled out and a total of 150 bike hire stations would be dotted in strategic locations around the CBD, the Valley, West End and Newstead.