Capital Bikeshare launches on Monday

The reason I don't write about Capital Bikeshare, the bike sharing system in DC and Arlington County (and maybe eventually other locations in the Washington Metroplitan Area) or bikesharing much anymore is I have joined a business startup that focuses on what I call "bicycle facilities systems integration" although the website calls it bicycle parking and sharing systems.

In short, it means that our firm sells bicycle sharing systems, although we don't yet have any deployments yet. The technology that we sell is in operation in three cities in Brazil, although we will be using a different bike.

Any analysis I do of other systems ends up being proprietary and my business loses competitive advantages if we identify publicly the weaknesses (and advantages) that we may or may not discern in their systems. SO it's just easier for me to not blast out my analysis (you can call it "opinion") in the blog.

We are finalists for a system in Chattanooga, although so are Bixi and bcycle, and you know that old joke about IBM -- that it was the dependable vendor, and no one ever got fired for hiring IBM. We'll see what happens. The decision is supposed to be made by the end of the month. I will either be ecstatic or very down. But so far, we are still in the running.

Ironically, some of the "pathbreaking" points in our proposal were ideas that I blogged about and shared with DC, but they never used them, in advance of the deployment of the SmartBike DC program.

Jim Sebastian with the prototype bike of the first in the nation high tech bike sharing program. It works sort of like Zipcar. Jahi Chikwendiu/Washington Post.

That being said, bike sharing is cool, although there are some very basic requirements to make it work, and DC is just on the cusp of being able to be successful. It can be successful for sure in the core of the city. But if equity and other reasons demand that stations be put in other areas of the city where success is not assured, that can make overall success much more difficult.

The City of Portland Department of Transportation has a pretty good overview of the various issues involved in successful deployment. And I like Yonah Freemark's analysis of the DC system at Transport Politic, "Ensuring the Efficient Workings of a Bike-Sharing System" and of London's, "Can Bike Sharing Work in Cities With Monofunctional Job Centers?"

Bikesharing works differently than if you own a bike, where you mix errands and riding. With bikesharing, you don't have a lock. So you lock the bike in a station only--you're on the hook for the bike if you lose it, although the price being charged to DC for the bikes is just a tad over $1,000, and the charge for loss is less than the cost of the bike.

What it means is you do your errand first, and then get the bike.

There's still time to join Capital Bikeshare at the special introductory rate of $50.

And I recommend that you do so because it is definitely freeing.

Bixi bicyclists in the Ports of Old Montreal.