Waterloo Grad Students Win $25,000 for Bike-Share Program Proposal
by Jenna Watson, Barcelona on 05.13.08
Waterloo, Ontario could become one of the first North American cities with a bike-sharing program. Three grad students, Ben Finklemen, Ben Clare and Matthew Lee have won a $25,000 prize from TD Bank’s Friends of the Environment Foundation for their proposal for a two-wheeler-share program in the Canadian "university town".
The students from the School of Planning are planning to take their proposal to the Waterloo regional council in the fall and see if they can get it going. If successful, it could mean less car trips and easier movement throughout the Kitchener-Waterloo area.
This proposal is aimed at people aged 15-24 and would start with approximately 100 bikes in 14 designated bike stations. The plan is that bikes would be free for the first hour, $2.50 for the second and third hours and $5.00 for every hour after that. People would swipe their credit cards and enter a code to access a bike.
This is slightly different from the very successful program in Barcelona which has a 2-hour limit aimed at keeping the bikes available to everybody and to avoid people keeping them for long periods. As well, in Barcelona you don’t swipe your credit card to access a bicycle; you have a membership card which is tied to your credit or debit card. However, as in Barcelona, the Waterloo program would have a website where you could see the availability of bikes at each station.
This is the first year for the Go Green Challenge that encourages Canadian college and university students to create ideas for helping our Mother Earth. Four $25,000 awards were available from the TD Foundation. These Waterloo students will get to keep half for themselves and the other half for the Waterloo Faculty of Environmental Studies.
More on Bike Sharing:
Barcelona Bicing Program .
Bike sharing program in Paris
Bike sharing in San Francisco.
TD Foundation Go Green Challenge.
This is a fine idea ... BUT ...
Bikes need an assortment of extra gear ... a lock, a helmet, assorted other safety equipment etc.
However, if making temporary biking available gets people started biking, then it is a good idea.
I would prefer to see Waterloo, Ontario & the TD Bank’s Friends of the Environment to spend $25000.oo on upgrading bike paths and bike lanes in the University area.
First North American city? Plenty of cities in the US have bike sharing programs and have had them for a decade.
As a Waterloo student, I know first hand that this bike sharing program will be hard to get going. First, any sort of charge card program for "renting" bikes is going to run into trouble since many University students (the ones who have credit cards) are not likely to pay to use a bike (no matter how little the cost). Furthermore, it is almost guaranteed that bikes will start to gather in certain locations more than others. Look to other cities that have implemented bike sharing programs; students will rent a bike, take it down a hill for an easy ride and then leave it at a bottom of the hill location. This requires transporting of the bikes back to their original location, negating any carbon offsetting the bikes may accomplish. Also, students at both Universities (Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier) already enjoy free public transit and the bus routes are becoming better with each passing year. Moreover, with both Universities sitting directly across the street from one another, shopping, bars, restaurants, etc... almost everything a student needs, is located within 1 or 2 km. Another issue, already addressed above, is with equipment and repairs. Who supplies the helmets? the locks? who repairs the bikes when they are broken? who fronts the cost of these repairs? I think bike sharing is a good idea for the city, but we should be focusing less on university students and more on the commuters that flock to RIM and other large corporations within the city from their big homes in the 'burbs.
Conor
I think this is a great idea. Don't for get the disabled community. Prehaps providing a few 3-wheel bicycles so you can reach the whole community.
It works well in Portland, Oregon
I agree about the helmet and other gear (although, for very casual riders, other gear may not be necessary), but a bike lock would be irrelevant if one happened to have a bike station at both his place of departure and his destination - assuming bikes can be returned to any station.
If a bike station or two were placed on campus, and more bike stations at the more student-populated residential areas around Waterloo, it could be possible for many students to get by without ever needing a bike lock.
Congrats - Ben, Ben and Matthew,
Great idea and definitely needed - perhaps some funding could go for some carriers as well? I remember it was a long haul from Zehrs to my place on Churchill. It is good to see innovation coming from SURP!
Cheers - Eric
There is a program like this (I think) in Lexington, KY. Except you pay $10 for the whole year, which is a pretty good deal. However, they are taken off the streets for winter stroage.
http://www.lexingtonyellowbikes.com/home1.html
Nice but isn't this a little bit of not really enough being done to answer bigger issues.
I don't think Waterloo is the first to have a bikeshare.
Toronto had a successful bikesharing program for several years.
Bikeshare, run by the Community Bicycle Network, was even cheaper than the Waterloo program (a one time membership fee for the year meant access to hundreds of bikes all over the city), didn't have an age limit, and was a lovely addition to the transportation landscape of Toronto.
I think they had too many tire slashing incidents, and not enough donations, and maybe no grants, because Bikeshare has been on hiatus for about a year now.
This information is easily found through a Google search, and I'm surprised the reporter didn't know about it.Maybe I've missed something?
Thanks everybody for your great comments. Definitely this proposal needs work. Please note that the original Waterloo alumni newsletter said it could tbe he first N.A. city to have this type of program. I changed that to could be one of the first. I didn't mean to imply that there were no others, simply that there aren't too many that work well. Definitely there are programs such as this in North America, but I think that Paris, Brussels and Barcelona are perhaps the most successful of their kind.
Please keep the comments coming, especially about successful programs in your town!
Drexel University in Philadelphia already has a bike sharing program!