Workshop TR 2.4, Tuesday 20 June,14.00 - 15.30

Free city bikes, panel discussion, followed by technical tour

Søren B. Jensen and Britta Krogh- Lund, Road Department, Building and Construction Administration, Copenhagen Free City Bike Schemes Copenhagen has run a project with free city bikes for more than 5 years. In the project there has been between 1500-2000 bikes. You get the bike out of the rack by putting a coin 3$ in the bike and you could bike around in the Inner-city as long time you want, and you get the coin back when you replace the bike in one of the 110 special racks. At the Velocity Conference in Barcelona 1997 we try to start a European network on Free City Bikes: Sandnes, Trondheim, Stavanger, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Hannover, Mannheim, Marburg, Oderland (east of Berlin) Vienna and Copenhagen. Antwerp, Gent, Zurich, Rennes and Montpellier have already expressed their interest. In this way there is a big interest to discuss aspects of different systems and Copenhagen will suggest the following ones: - Do free city bikes have any effect on the general traffic pattern or are they only for leisure? - Which differences in use and maintenance are there between open systems with coins as in the supermarkets and closed systems with smart cards or clubs? - How much should the municipalities gets involved? - Is it possible to run free city bike schemes on advertising revenues alone?  Can they cover both investments in bikes and racks and the running expenditure to administration and maintenance?

Joep Huffener, Cycling Officer, Department of Infrastructure, Traffic and Transport of the City of Amsterdam Bikes on Dikes: a Dutch plan for (almost) free wheeling Inner cities are becoming more and more congested. City dwellers and visitors are subjected to air pollution and noise. Access to and travel within the city centers is problematic. In order to maintain a reasonable environment within inner cities it is vital to connect established traffic styles with alternative methods of transport. To make cycling more accesible, the city of Amsterdam supported by a group of companies (KPN Telecom, Chipper Nederland, The Amsterdam municipal  Transport Company GVB, the Postbank and Y-Tech innovation center) are introducing an individual public transport system that will put 750 white public bikes at some 45 depositories across town. GVB, the municipal Transport Company will act as operator, because they think of it as individual public transport. The public bicycle (White Bike) is clearly distinguishable from private bikes by its special design. The White bike has no lock because it is not intended to be parked anywhere outside the depos. Replacing the bike in the parking rack at the destination site results in automatically locking the bike, charging the battery and ending the rent period. The white bike transport system is a network of unmanned “parking lots” (depo) where White bikes await the passenger The passenger inserts a chipcard, transfers payment, takes a bicycle out of the parking rack and proceeds to the White bike depo of choice. At the destination a parking space is automatically reserved. The Telecom data lines connect the individual depo modes to central procesors at the GVB. Chipper smart cards are used to identify the White biker and to transfer payments. Depo functionality separately includes Internet and Telephone access as a Telecom service to the White bike user. There also is a electric airpump for normal city bikes free of charge available