NCC seeking buyer for Bixi program
Downtown bike-share program still in low gear
The bike-share program has seen its share of bumps in the road and now a new operator is being sought to take over.
The National Capital Commission wants to sell its Bixi bikeshare program and is inviting potential bidders to help it come up with terms that will make a sale make sense. Those could be hard to find.
In its third year, the Bixi system has 25 stations and 250 bikes in Ottawa and Gatineau, clustered around the tourist core. Members and people willing to pay a premium for one-time use can borrow the sturdy red bikes at any station and drop them off again at any other.
It loses money, says NCC spokesman Jean Wolff: $76,000 on operations last year. That doesn’t take into account the capital costs of buying new bikes and stations, either: it’s just the cost of running the system day to day. That’s not why the commission is selling, he said; building a functioning system and then handing it off was the intention from the very beginning. “It is not covering its costs yet, but there is a steady improvement in number of trips,” Wolff says. “There is increase in the number — small, but the number of regular subscribers is increasing. The number of locals using it is increasing.”
That last part is crucial if bike-sharing is to have a future here. Some cities with much larger programs use bike-sharing services like Bixi as integral parts of their transportation systems, though it typically takes thousands of bicycles and dozens of stations to make that work.
The NCC owns the system, including the bikes and the docking stations dotted around downtown, and it has two years left on an operating contract with the Public Bike System Co. of Montreal, which also sold the NCC the equipment. That company is private but it’s controlled by the City of Montreal and it’s a mess on virtually all fronts.
The company owns and operates Montreal’s Bixi system, which launched on the promise it could be funded by operating contracts in other cities, especially internationally. But launches in cities like New York and Chicago have been delayed by software glitches and the company found itself in a multimilliondollar cash crunch in 2011, having bought thousands of bikes and stations that weren’t making any money. The City of Montreal stepped in with a $108-million rescue that got the Public Bike System Co. through its immediate crisis but even now the future of the company is in question. A takeover by Montreal’s transit agency is in the offing. Yet the Quebec government is insisting the company divest its international operations, since city-owned companies aren’t allowed to expand abroad.
A similar situation is playing out in Toronto, where a Public Bike System Co. offshoot owns and operates a system with 1,000 bicycles. A city government promise to pay for a 2,000-bike expansion was scuttled by bike-hostile Mayor Rob Ford, though, and the company can’t cover its costs. City staff there want the City of Toronto to take the local Bixi program over to save it from extinction — and from defaulting on a $3.9-million loan the city guaranteed to help the company start operations.
If the Toronto system had been able to expand, the Public Bike System Co.’s president Michel Philibert lamented publicly, it wouldn’t have the money problems it does. That’s an important thing about bike-sharing systems: The more stations they have, the more appealing they are, because there’s no point taking a bike if you can’t drop it off somewhere convenient. Ottawa-Gatineau’s is the smallest of the Public Bike System Co.’s urban systems by far: Montreal has 400 stations and even Toronto’s has 80.
The company’s tribulations aren’t a problem here, Wolff says. It’s delivering the service it’s supposed to. “In terms of our relationship with Bixi, our relationship with PBSC, everything is fine. Our contract is working. It is working fine. This is new territory, this is a new system, this is a new form of transit — I would say public transit, but it is individual public transit, if you see what I mean — and we are learning, as is everyone.”
But it’s obvious that OttawaGatineau’s system has not grown the way the commission would have liked.
A feasibility study the NCC commissioned in 2009 to see whether the idea was worth trying advised starting with 50 stations. Three years in, the Capital Bixi system has half that. Neither Ottawa nor Gatineau has invested in it, as the study assumed would happen. By now the study expected users would take well over a million rides in a year; last year there were fewer than 50,000.
Bixi is the larger of Ottawa’s two bike-sharing services. RightBike does roughly the same thing as Bixi but it works on a very different scale as a “social enterprise” run by the Causeway Work Centre partly to give its clients meaningful jobs. It has a few dozen refurbished bikes at eight low-tech stations.
“I’ve used Bixi. I’ve used it in Toronto and I’ve used it Montreal, and one of the things we wanted to do was have a program that was affordable — affordable to use and affordable to run,” says Don Palmer, Causeway’s executive director. Bixi is a heavy system, he says, with credit-card devices at each bike station, a truck to ferry bikes around, and staff who cost money. Even the bikes are heavy.
Wolff wouldn’t say what happens if nobody steps up with an offer: “This is entirely speculative and hypothetical and negative and I’m not going to entertain it.”
A notice of the intention to sell posted this week gives interested buyers until Aug. 13 to invite themselves to meetings the NCC will hold later to hash out the possibilities.