Atlantic Cities, Bloomberg, the Montreal Gazette and other press have collectively outlined the past and future of bike-share…
First the Past (the smart-dock)
Bikelandia continues to boom… Citi Bike is wildly popular… But most North American bikeshare is at an odd financial crossroads. Chattanooga, Ottawa and Toronto bikeshares are reported to be in precarious financial states. Clear Channel shuttered its programs. Once nice Minnesota Nice Ride says its supplier Bixi is in breach of contract. In Los Angeles Bike Nation suffered a failure to launch. Even in Montréal all is not Concordia Salus: its own city auditor has questioned whether Bixi can continue here, there…or anywhere. And across the ocean in Paris, matriarch Vélib is even cutting back (reportedly due to vandalism).
Most disconcerting for North American programs is embodied in an article in Atlantic Cities: Could Bixi’s Financial Problems Affect Bike-share in New York, D.C. and Beyond? Bloomberg has even asked How Will Cities Bike-Share with No Bikes?
Common thread: all these programs use the smart-dock technology first used by Velib in 2007.
Now the Future (the smart-bike and smart-lock)
Smart-bike. The industry needs to drive down cost. Fortunately Social Bicycles, Zagster and others recognized the fundamental infrastructure flaws of the smart-dock system and have developed much lower cost, more flexible smart-bike systems. In the NYC-area the Hoboken Hybrid pilot has done extremely well. In fact, while much smaller, it out performed its cross-river companion Citibike (which uses the older approach) on nearly every metric.
Smart-lock. But the smart-bike may still be too expensive to operate. An even more exciting innovation than the smart-bike is the super low cost, super flexible, smart-lock. Atlantic Cities highlights the smart-lock developed by a San Francisco company called the BitLock. Whereas the Bixi system is infrastructure overkill, the BitLock is simple…like a bike. It puts all the smarts on the lock itself. It’s a lot less expensive too. While Bixi programs have cost taxpayers millions, Bitlock’s Dr Mehrdad Majzoobi (PhD) is doing it the old fashioned American-way, on Kickstarter.
Right now Dr Majzoobi’s Bitlock seems to be a residential-strength peer-to-peer technology. But with so many conventional bikeshare programs and one the major suppliers in financial straits, could an industrial-strength version of Dr Majzoobi’s Bitlock be the no-nonsense replacement for major markets like New York?
Another view of the future is the Lock-8 which is advertised to be able to be fitted onto 95% of all bikes (and theoretically bikes from any bankrupt smart-dock systems).
