City bike-sharing scheme to stay
Melbourne, Montreal and London have them. Now Christchurch is looking to introduce its own citywide bike-share scheme.
The Christchurch City Council has budgeted $400,000 towards the project and is calling for proposals.
The move comes as a pilot scheme, run independently of the council, nears its end. The temporary service allowed riders to unlock bikes and helmets from one of six stations via an app. Details on a permanent scheme are sketchy, but it is understood the targeted rollout is spring next year.
Deputy Mayor Vicki Buck said the bike-share scheme would become part of Christchurch’s public transport system.
‘‘It gives people more choice about their transport modes and ultimately if we can get people onto modes other than cars every other road user would benefit, including car users.
‘‘If you look at the amount of time that a bike or a car spends sitting in a garage and the investment we make in it, increasingly it make sense to share these things.’’
An indicative business case noted Christchurch was the first city in the southern hemisphere to trial smart bikes equipped with GPS technology and capable of reading travel cards like a MetroCard.
Buck said the system would ideally be configured to use MetroCards or other travel cards.It was likely bike-share stations would be set up across the city.
The business case assessed areas where the system would be most viable across greater Christchurch. The preferred option was for one concentrated around the central city extending west to Riccarton and Ilam.
‘‘[There will] likely be opportunities to expand the reach of the system’s coverage to key centres such as Sydenham, Edgeware, Linwood, Woolston and other key centres,’’ Buck said.
The pilot bike-share scheme has run for two and a half years and will finish at the end of summer.
Powered by nextbike, a company that specialises in public bike-share systems, users unlock bikes using an app. The first half hour is free, and any hour beyond that costs $4. Project manager Robert Henderson said by the end of the summer he expected there to have been about 20,000 trips made using the system, 75 per cent of them by locals.
The project was born of a desire to connect a city Henderson said was just starting to open up after the earthquakes, and to highlight how bikes could form part of a public transport system.
‘‘We’ve really wanted to build a case for bike shares and make that case where we can. The pilot has got the city to a point where it’s looking at a bike share and in that respect it’s been successful.’’
Through his company, Bike Solutions, and a consortium of others, Henderson was in the process of tendering for the citywide project, which he said had drawn attention from national and international companies.
A permanent bike-share scheme was ‘‘super important if we think about what the city is going to be like in 10 or 20 years’’, he said.