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Bixi's high-tech bike sharing system comes to Montreal
Montreal is the first North American city to become home to Bixi, a new large-scale bicycle sharing system. It's a setup that's computer-chip based, solar-powered and Wi-Fi-enabled.
There are 300 downtown bike stations with 3,000 bikes. If you want to use one of the bikes, simply swipe your credit card. You can then return the bike to any one of the 300 stations around the city when you're done. It's a brilliant system, one that, if it catches on in Montreal, you can be sure we'll see in most urban downtowns in the not-too-distant future.
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By haLo at 12:25 PM ON 05/18/09
This is a nice "green" concept, but where do you live the bike when all the bike stations are full? There are 3000 bikes and 300, so 10 bikes per station, and if 20 people go to the same place/area, what then? :)
By Juko at 1:40 PM ON 05/18/09
In Paris this works really well - if a station is full, the terminal at the station shows you a map of the area with the next station, and gives you an extra 15 mins free time to find it :-)
By nurbie at 1:41 PM ON 05/18/09
Maybe there is a way to incorporate your own bike into that mix? Maybe the possibility of purchasing or long term leasing so that the owner made sure if the worked in a hot spot they could pay a little more and a bike would always be available and allow others to use it during weekend or what have you.
By www.pierreb.ca at 1:02 AM ON 05/19/09
i wonder how traffic is going to be downtown. we already have a hard enough time driving on st catherine near concordia with people not following signalization. lets see how bad its going to get with people on bikes not following ...... that intersection is going to be impossible to drive on. great job by the city tho! i love how they are going green as much as they can. they should figure out solutions for traffic also.
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i wonder how traffic is going to be downtown. we already have a hard enough time driving on st catherine near conco...More »