Expect to see a lot of these bicycles on the streets of Minneapolis this coming summer.
The non-profit formed to bring public bike-sharing to the city chose Public Bike System, the developer of Montreal's BIXI, to provide bikes and kiosks to the project.
The bike-sharing project, Nice Ride Minnesota, is aiming to put 65 kiosks around downtown, college campuses and surrounding commerial areas by June. In all 80 kiosks and 1,000 bikes are projected in Phase 1. (Download map of kiosk locations.)
Currently, there are about 160 bike-sharing systems in the world. The highest profile is the Paris Velib system, with 20,000-some bikes.
US systems
The Bike-Sharing blog, which tracks new bike-share systems around the world, reports three active bike-sharing systems in the US, but only one that's public — SmartBike in Washington DC. The other two are on college campuses: Green Bike at Saint Xavier University in Chicago and ZotWheels at UC-Irvine.
Boston also has chosen BIXI to supply bikes and kiosks for its future bike-sharing project. The company visited Seattle last summer as part of a bike-sharing demonstration with three other vendors.
The BIXI system kicked off in Montreal last May with 3,000 bicycles at 300 stations. More than 1 million miles were logged that first year, before the system was put in hibernation for the snowy winter months.
Short trips
The Nice Ride system is designed for those needing to make short trips. They can take a bike from one kiosk and drop it off at another.
The bikes are designed for use by people wearing regular clothes and include fenders, a front rack and lights.
Users will swipe a subscriber card or credit card to receive a bike at one kiosk. They're charged $5 a day for unlimited bike rides, as long as the bike is returned to a kiosk within 30 minutes. People keeping the bikes for more than 30 minutes will be charged extra. If they don't return the bikes, they'll be charged the full cost of the bike on their credit card.
Funding
The program will be funded by a Bike Walk Twin Cities grant, user fees, and part of the tobacco settlement award to Blue Cross-Blue Shield. As a partner in the program, Blue Cross will display its “do” slogan to fight obesity on the bikes.
Also, local companies will sponsor bike-share kiosks.
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