BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

One is going in here at Bakery Square too. Tale told it will help the CMU/Google/SEI folks.

If you were here ~ 4 years ago, CMU tried a bike share where they bought 100 or so bikes and scattered them around campus. No locks, nothing. The idea was to ride it to class, and drop it off, maybe ride another one back.

In less than a week, they were 90% missing, all stuffed in basements and/or stolen by non-students/non-faculty. A few weeks later, it was like it never happened.

CMU != utopia apparently...who would've thought.

Here's the BkSq station:

sweeeeeeeeeeet!!! can anyone get in on this??

I also want to know more! Here's a picture of that same station posted at the top (between Hamburg and Smith Halls) in daylight, with one lonely bike there.

How are we just now hearing about this? Is it CMU/ Google only? I could use a bike share today...

The kiosk terminal didn't have much in the way of instructions, but I think the screen said it was restricted to CMU and Google affiliates. Though as a CMU affiliate, I haven't heard about it (much less been instructed on how to use it) until I turned the corner and came upon this.

There are just about as many bikes in salty's picture as open slots in ieverhart's, and the paint job & stickers in ieverhart's match the bikes in salty's. I suspect this isn't a coincidence--bet it's only two stations so far, and not quite ready for prime time (or heavily restricted), and that's why we haven't heard about it yet.

Anyone know the plans for B-cycle? I believe they did a demo last year or so.

I went to DC a couple months ago and we signed up for 2 days of Capital Bikeshare. We did about 25 miles of pedaling around town the one day, it was very cool. The instructions weren't clear to me that if you take the bikes in 29 minute increments you wouldn't be charged more than the $7 per day. So after having the bikes out for 80+ minutes at a time and getting charged 20 bucks, we would ride for 29 minutes, ride (wreck) straight into a dock to beat the clock, then go through scanning the debit card and detaching the bikes again to save a few bucks. A couple stations were broken completely and a couple times they were full and we had to ride a mile out of our way to park at different locations. Otherwise, we felt like we got more out of DC than the other couple riding the train around.

Anyhow, those look like the exact same bikes. 3 speeds with hub generated blinky's. I wish they were for public use.

Ok, I checked with our (Google) facilities group about what I was allowed to say and they told me it's not a big secret or anything, so...

It is a pilot program - like Ian said it's Google and CMU only at this point, but Bike Pittsburgh has also been involved with this and the hope is that it will roll out to a wider audience and hopefully eventually be city-wide. It's not operational yet but it should be soon. We had a bike in our office but I haven't had time to take a close look at it, it definitely has an IGH and generator though.

I don't really know any more than that - I'm not sure if there are more than 2 stations for now or what the timeframe might be for making it more widely available. I think it would be very cool to open it up to more people, even if it's on a limited basis. I suggested maybe letting us enroll friends and family, we'll see if that goes anywhere.

My worry is, a lot of my co-workers who are inclined to ride already do so, plus we already have a few loaner bikes. Being able to do a "one-way" trip is certainly novel though.

Wow. Even as a pilot project, this is pretty exciting.

Still would take a major long-term commitment to get and keep something like this running.

We helped Walnut Capital with the logistics, but weren't touting it far and wide because it's meant to be a private system for Google employees and CMU grad students and faculty. We are beginning to get the pieces of the puzzle in place for a larger public system, but are probably 12-18 months away from that reality. It's going to take a new organization with its own staff and board, and cost millions of dollars. It's really exciting to be a part of it.

12-18 months will probably fly by, I'm sure (I feel like the past few years have been doing just that).

But yeah, a public bike share would eliminate stress about how I'm getting to work if I don't have time to fix a flat in the morning, for sure.

It would also be great for the occasional time I can only bike one way of my commute.

I was in southern france the last two weeks and observed some heavy use of bike share in Toulouse and Bordeaux. The bikes in Bordeaux had drive shafts!

just fyi, walnut capital is definitely saying this will be city wide.

Indeed. It won't cover the entire city but will cover downtown, east end, north side, south side. There will be public input about it.

awesome