The Velibs are coming?

@arch77 wrote:

has anyone else noticed that some of them may have been positioned incorrectly.. The exchequer st ones are quite far out from the path… and the bikes will project another 1.2m approx into the street. Also one of the first photos on this thread show’s the post tight against the kerb. the bike wont be able to fit in. I won’t be at all surprised if they have to amend half of them! port tunnel etc etc.

The ones you refer to in that photo are down by the Luas at Charlemont and are off the road. Also, that pic was taken before the docks were properly set into the ground, so I don’t think there will actually be a kerb there once they’re finished, at least judging by other ones around town.

Perhaps the bikes on Exchequer Street will go on the path side rather than the road side?

Don’t mention the Port Tunnel ‘debacle’ on this site by the way, you’ll get certain people very irate! In short, there never was a problem with it, as it was not designed to take supertrucks – they don’t come over here in the first place apparently.

DCC have posted information to boards .ie regarding the operation of the scheme in Dublin. (Maybe the should have got JC Decaux to post the info on the billboards?)
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055571493&page=2

Official DublinBike
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Posted on 26/5/09 by DCC Cycling person:

We’re working on a new cycling web site for Dublin City at the moment but thought this information may be valuable to pop up as the new site won’t be live for 2-3 weeks. When it is we’ll post the address here too.

http://www.dublinbikes.ie is JCDecaux’s web site specifically for the City Bikes scheme itself.

City-goers will be able to collect a bike from any station and return it to any station on the network e.g. you could collect a bike from a station on Talbot Street and return it to a station at Stephens Green or vice versa. The cost of installation, management and maintenance of the bikes and their stations (including replacing and repairing the bikes) will be covered by JC Decaux. JC Decaux have agreed to provide the bikes as part of an Outdoor Advertising and public Amenities contract with Dublin City Council.

The dublinbikes scheme will operate between 5am and 12.30am, 7 days a week. An automated card machine will be located at each station where users can either use a smartcard (members) or a credit card (non-members) to take out a bike. Bikers who wish to sign up for a smartcard will pay an annual subscription fee of just €10, while occasional dublinbike users may prefer to pay a small charge (€2 for 3 days) for the use of the bikes. Once removed from any station, the bikes can be used for up to 30 minutes free of charge, with a relatively low charge per hour of rental thereafter (e.g. 0-30mins = free, 30-60mins = €0.50, 60-90mins = €1, etc). The bikes cannot be taken out using cash.

Locations of the ‘dublinbike’ stations:

You can see a mockup here
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1. Chatham Street
2. Blessington Street
3. Bolton Street
4. Greek Street
5. Charlemont Place
6. Christchurch Place
7. High Street
8. Custom House Quay
9. Exchequer Street
10. Dame Street
11. Earlsfort Terrace
12. Eccles Street
13. Fitzwilliam Square West
14. Fownes Street Upper
15. Hardwiche Street
16. Georges Quay
17. Golden Lane
18. Grantham Street
19. Herbert Place
20. James Street East
21. Leinster Street South
22. Townsend Street
23. Custom House
24. Cathal Brugha Street
25. Merrion Square East
26. Merrion Square West
27. Molesworth Street
28. Mountjoy Square West
29. Ormond Quay Upper
30. Parnell Square North
31. Parnell Street
32. Pearse Street
33. Princes Street North/ O’ Connell Street
34. Portobello Harbour
35. Smithfield
36. St. Stephens Green East
37. St. Stephens Green South
38. Talbot Street
39. Wilton Terrace
40. Jervis Street

FAQs

Do I have to return my bike to the same station I got it from?
No. The bikes can be taken from/returned to any station on the network.

Can I pay by cash?
Unfortunately no. The cards offer security so that if a situation arises whereby a user does not return their bike after use they will be charged. Cash does not offer the same security and could lead to a small percentage of users abusing the scheme.

How much does the scheme cost?
10 euro per year for membership or 2 euro for 3 days. It is then free to use the bikes for the first half hour, 0.50 euro for the next half hour(i.e. 0.50 euro for an hour), 1 euro from 60-90 mins(i.e. 1.50 euro for an hour and a half), and 2 euro from 90-120 mins(i.e. 3.50 euro for 2 hours)

Why is it more expensive for longer durations?
We wish to encourage short-term use of the bikes so that there will be more bikes available to as many people as possible. In other cities there has been a high turnover of bike usage e.g each bike in the velib scheme (in Paris) is used on average 8 times a day.

What’s to stop somebody else taking a bike using my details while I’m still at the ticket machine?
Each bike stand will be numbered. Once you have selected your bike there will be a time delay before the bike is released from its stand. This will give you a chance to walk from the ticket machine to the bike before the bike is unlocked.

Why is there no bike station at Heuston Station?
In order for the scheme to work, the bike stations must be ideally no further than 300m apart. This will ensure that in the unlikely event of a bike station being full, users will not have far to travel to the next nearest station. Heuston station serves many commuters and therefore it is likely many users would arrive at the station at approximately the same time (evening rush hour peak) on bikes taken out from a number of different stations. If the bike station at Heuston were full and there wasn’t a sufficient number of bike stations nearby to accommodate the user, users would be likely to miss their train. This would put many people off using the service.

It is predicted that the usage of the service at Heuston would be such that a high concentration of stations would be required in the vicinity and furthermore on the approach from the city centre (every 300m) for the scheme to work effectively. Given that there are 450 bikes overall, this would spread the scheme quite finely, with core areas in the city centre suffering as a result.

If the scheme proves to be a success, it is likely the scheme will be extended to a ‘phase 2’ which will include Heuston station and other areas outside the city centre core.

What should I do if I get a puncture en route?
Don’t worry – punctures happen from general wear and tear and you won’t be charged if your bike gets a puncture. Just drop the bike back to the nearest station. A number of service vehicles will travel to and from each station regularly with staff carrying out general repairs on the bikes.

I’m not a fan of that green… that bronze colour would have been better

I agree Morlan but im still not convinced the locations are fully optimised …

I want to see the formula…

Much as I’d like to rant against these, I have to admit liking the design of the bike stations. It grates ‘though that DCC have never put a fraction of this effort into providing bike parking for privately owned bicycles in the city.

However, the logic given for not having a stand at Heuston is absolute nonsense. They are designing the system to ensure that some of the most useful trips (between public transport hubs) will not be feasible – because they’d be too popular? You really haven’t thought about things fully if popularity and demand are seen as threats to the successful operation of the scheme and need to be prevented by design.

I think it stems from a confusion; these bike schemes are NOT about being greener as the small asymmetries in usage patterns leads to bikes bunching up in particular spots. All such schemes require a dedicated vehicle or fleet to redistribute the bikes among the stations in order to function efficiently. This is fundamental to operating a shared bike scheme – they simply do not and cannot work without this constant redistribution. So why would you not just have it as part of the evening routine to do a couple of rounds of picking up bikes from Hueston and redistributing them? I mean, this is a very limited scheme – you are only talking about 10s of bikes an hour.

The small scale of the Dublin scheme will make this aspect of operating the scheme very expensive indeed. Just to pay for a single van/driver is likely to add over 100 euro per year per bike and I suspect more than one man-with-a-van will be required. And that’s just the start; looking at the Parisian experience, you can expect that half the bikes will disappear or be vandalised beyond repair within a year and a half. When you add in the capital cost of the stations and the expense of providing bicycle and station maintenance, I suspect this scheme is likely to end up requiring a subsidy of at least a 1000 euro a year per bicycle. This scheme would never stand up to any sort of cost benefit analysis even if the social and green benefits are given a massive weighting but of course DCC views it as “free money” as they grabbed at the shiney trinkets being offered JCD in exchange for a bag of the family silver.

The implosion of the ill-conceived affordable housing scheme is looking likely to wipe out many councils financially and with rates collapsing as a result of the economic contraction, DCC are facing having to slash spending on a scale last seen during the 80s or face bankruptcy. I wonder what people will think in 5 years time – as your eye wanders from a shiney JCD metropole advertising panel and a nicely maintained “free bike” stand to the litter blowing around the place (after cutbacks in the street cleaning budget) and the rest of the public realm falling apart (maintenance budget slashed). Will the financial illiteracy of the the council finally be apparent?

Unfortunately I think not. Cost/benefit analysis is seen as a PR exercise in Ireland, a bit like an EIS – a bit of inconvenient bureaucracy to be dispensed with once the decision has been made. In fact, it’s regarded even less than an EIS because of a weirdly anti-quantitative ethos when it comes to public decision making in the country. It’s almost as if using numeracy, GASP – THE HORROR!, as a tool to try to assist making decisions on public spending is morally suspect; or that there is something wrong with putting a value on what spending will actually deliver for society and making decisions on that basis. Charlie McGreevy actually captured the mood when he expressed his belief in a “spend it when we have it” philosophy – naive in the extreme but I guess since we (as a country) never “had it” before, it seemed like as good an approach as any. Unfortunately this historically and economically ignorant approach is only exposed as being a way to impoverish future generations when the money starts to dry up.

The contrast with the city in which I currently find myself could not be more extreme. Here, not only are project costs very carefully analysed before making any decisions, many big capital spending decisions are subject to plebiscite. A key part of this process is that required tax increases must be stated. For example the public get to chose whether to pay an extra 2% income tax for 10 years in exchange for a metro line. Not surprisingly, the level of public discourse makes the Irish equivalent look like pre-school babbling. I could imagine a referendum in Ireland proposing to give every citizen of the state a million euro in cash being wildly popular.

As a result of this brutal public disection of proposed big public projects, the infrastructure, particularly public transport, is simply top class. The public – when presented with a bill for the things they demand from the state – become far more selective and value conscious. A typical example was Zurich’s decision in the 80s NOT to build some metro lines but instead to build a couple of Interconnectors for the existing heavy rail infrastructure and expand the tram network; the metro option was far more expensive and the public voted accordingly. In Ireland public money is always seen as “coming out of someone else’s pocket” so you are invariably presented with the undignified image of overfed special interests jostling for position trying to gobble as much from the tough of public money as they can before they’re elbowed out of the way by a greedier pig.

Hmm… seems I drifted completely off topic there. 😮

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article6727865.ece

Colin Coyle and Ruadhan MacEoin
It was christened the “free bike scheme” but JCDecaux, the French advertiser chosen to run a “bikes-for-billboards” project in Dublin, actually stands to earn €9m more than the city council from the project.

The contract signed by the council and the advertising company, which has been released to The Sunday Times after a ruling by the Information Commissioner, reveals that JCDecaux is due to make €63.38m in advertising revenue over 15 years from the 72 advertising billboards it has been allowed to erect.

By contrast, the council will receive benefits estimated to be worth €54.36m over 15 years, including 450 bicycles, 40 bicycle “stations”, €23.4m worth of advertising on the billboards, and a “wayfinding” system of 100 “fingerpost” signs directing tourists to attractions in the city.

The council has said JCDecaux was chosen to operate the scheme because its proposal was “costneutral”. Originally due to start two years ago, the scheme will now begin in mid-September. Bikes will be free to hire for the first 30 minutes, and are then paid for.

The city council had refused to release details of the contract, citing a confidentiality agreement with JCDecaux. Emily O’Reilly, the Information Commissioner, ruled, however, that “the public had not been given sufficient information on which to assess the council’s handling of the matter and to understand what the city might stand to gain or lose”.

O’Reilly also criticised the council for not releasing all the records relating to the deal to her office until a late stage in her investigation. The council apologised, saying it had “inadvertently omitted” some documents due to an oversight. She said that “the very existence of secrecy [with the process] carries with it the scope for abuse”.

Based on JCDecaux’s advertising rate card for the billboards, the company could have made in excess of €170m had every one of its “metropole” units and smaller “metropanel” advertising stands been rented continuously over 15 years.

But a spokesman for the council defended the deal, saying that the projected net revenue of €63.38m had been agreed almost three years ago, before an advertising downturn took hold.

“My understanding is that, based on the current market, the company is not achieving the projected rates agreed in 2006. The deal has worked out well for the city, and our advertising campaigns, particularly the anti-litter campaign and a drive to get people to visit their local library, have been a huge success,” he said.

In an internal council report conducted on 32 of the advertising units, it was found that only eight were free from “road-user infringements”, with some blocking drivers’ sightlines and causing “blind spots”.

JCDecaux agreed to remove 50 of its existing advertising hoardings to reduce “visual clutter” in the city. Details of the negotiations reveal that the council originally planned to give JCDecaux permission for 170 advertising units, in exchange for 500 bicycles and a number of public lavatories. Under that agreement, Decaux would have made €125m in advertising revenue over 15 years, while the council would have recouped €101m in benefits. This deal was later renegotiated to give JCDecaux permission to erect 120 advertising hoardings, but only 72 were granted planning permission following appeals to An Bord Pleanala from locals and An Taisce.

Ian Lumley of An Taisce said: “Dubliners appear to have got a poor deal. There should have been an environmental impact assessment, and new units built close to historic buildings should have been referred to us.”

I have to presume that they gave them such a stupid name just so they’d have the initials “db” which might resemble the wheels of a bike. So why the F*** don’t they have each letter representing a wheel? It’s completely idiotic!!!

Graham, nope not just you….

Looks like someone waiting for the proctologist to “glove up”.

I much prefer Graham’s version, my first reaction was closer to jimg’s, although South Park has a lot to answer for for that… 😀