Tucson, Arizona recently introduced a program whereby city employees have access to a fleet of city-owned bicycles to use for work, to run errands, or to grab lunch. The initiative, called City Cycle, provides bikes, helmets, and locks to employees at eight downtown Tucson locations.
Among City Cycle’s stated goals is a reduction in fuel consumption and improved air quality. "Tucson is a bike-friendly community," said Tom Thivener, the city’s bicycle and pedestrian coordinator. "We want to get people who don’t normally get on bikes to get on bikes to get the spinoff effect of more people maybe riding bikes to work."
Thivener is working with Tucson’s largest businesses to give his model of a corporate fleet of bicycles a spin. Raytheon, the city’s largest employer, was the first to enlist. Randy Rogers-Gardner, Raytheon’s energy conservation manager, plans to have a 20-bike fleet in place by mid-April.
"It’s a good mile from one extreme of where people are in buildings to the other extreme," Rogers-Gardner told the Tucson Citizen. "In lieu of walking, it’s much faster. In lieu of riding a cart or car, it’s faster because you have to park the car. Although carts are efficient, they are not carbon neutral. They do have maintenance issues."
Both the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University (Flagstaff, AZ) have small-scale bike sharing operations in place. UA uses abandoned student bikes for a grassroots faculty program. NAU takes discarded rigs, spruces them up a bit, paints them bright yellow, and relies on the old-school version 1.0 method of bike sharing – people can pick them up wherever they find them and leave them when they’re done riding. The freewheeling system allows for easy access and little to no cost for administering the program, but bikes commonly disappear or are vandalized.
The kinks are still being ironed out at these universities, but they’re both looking to expand into more comprehensive bike-sharing programs.
Although bike-sharing has existed in a primitive form, similar to what’s offered at NAU, for many years throughout Europe and in some US locations, it’s only in the past couple of years that cities have figured out a more succesful method for providing bikes.
Lyon and Paris, France offer the modern bike-sharing models that other cities are scrambling to copy. Their Velo’v and Vélib programs, respectively, offer thousands of bikes available for checkout at automated stations all over the city. Users pay nominal fees for annual memberships and are able to take a year’s worth of short trips (under a half hour) free of charge. Longer trips incur a reasonable, sliding scale which encourage a quick turn-over. Bikes can be checked out and returned at any one of the hundreds of stations.
There are currently 63 cities in Europe offering bike-sharing programs. As we reported in Bike-Sharing Programs Coming Our Way and New Bike-Sharing Program in Portland, there are many more cities, including several in the US, looking to follow in these footsteps (or, pedalstrokes?).
There are no firm plans for a city-wide bike-sharing program in Tucson as yet, but Tucson’s mayor responded favorably to a city-wide proposal for bike sharing. Tucson is one of seven cities that the League of American Cyclists granted gold-level status for bike-friendliness. A success in this smaller-scale business fleet model could be just the impetus the city needs to bring bikes to the masses.
Via the Tucson Citizen.
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what about belgium?