Subscribe to RSSBike Rental Trial Back For RWC
Bikes for hire are back in Auckland for the Rugby Woirld Cup.
This time camping, tramping and mountain bike hire company Adventure Capital will be running it.
There will be 100 mountain bikes available.
Adults will be able to hire a bike for $10 a day or $5 for half a day. There will be 10 free rides a day.
The bikes will be placed between 9am and 6pm 7 days a week. There will be two bike stations, one near Britomart and the other at the Eastern Viaduct. Helmets are included and users will be given a cycle map of the central area and local attractions. In many overseas schemes, you have to provide your own helmet.
Auckland Transport launches the new bike hire scheme on September 1. It will run throughout the Tournament and finish on October 31.
Auckland Transport had called for expressions of interest. In its document inviting expressions of interest, Auckland Transport says:
“Experience locally and elsewhere suggests a reliance on some form of on-street or on-bike sponsorship revenue to support public bike hire schemes. In some cases this is also in combination with public funding. AT will consider the case for public funding and any budgetary implications at a later stage of this procurement process.
“It should go without saying that schemes that maximize the public benefit in terms of service provided (in this case number of cycles, cycle stations etc) and limit the call on public funds, will be looked on more favourably than the converse.”
Auckland Transport had indicated this was a trial and such a scheme may become permanent in the future. Auc
The body emphasised that whoever gots to run the trial had to demonstrate it could develop a business model that could be sustained over a longer term. “This would include confirmation and confidence that a commercial operator has access to capital and revenue sources to implement, maintain, manage, market and develop a successful scheme over the longer term and those submitting addressing what will become the contentious issue – whether the scheme can be operated on a fully commercial basis or would be dependent upon some level of public funding.”
Brisbane is a great example of how such a scheme should work. I raved about it after using it there.
Brisbane's scheme
Auckland’s earlier attempt, Nextbike ceased operating in November after being unable to economically sustain its advertiser funded model.
5 Comments
Jon, it’s 10 free rides per day, not 210. And they’re drawn randomly.
@Stranded Oops My mistype
“In many overseas schemes you have to provide your own helmet”……..That’s because they don’t wear helmets!! We are the only country to have a nation wide helmet law to my knowledge .
It takes time to fit a helmet correctly even if the right size and by the time you had finished fiddling with the adjusters to get it right you probably could have walked to the destination. How does the operator know that a helmet hasn’t been damaged?etc.
Frankly I wouldn’t use somebody else’s helmet or a second hand one.
Many cyclists hate wearing helmets and until the law is repealed I can’t see any hire operation being a goer here or in Australia
Richard, we already HAD a successful hire operation going here, which didn’t have a problem with the helmet law, but with Council threatening to pull their license, and banned them from increasing their bike fleet from 150 to 250, and restricted them to a laughably small number of stands (all which was reported big-time in the news media - and thus they lost some of the other advertising deals that could have kept them afloat).
Also, your comments are contradicting themselves. You argue that you’d never use an “unknown” helmet because it might be damaged, or because it might take 10-20 seconds to fit it (yep, that’s how long it took me with the Auckland scheme, on average, having used it maybe 2 dozen times - horrible delay, I know). Yet then you say that helmets are not needed!
I find it amazing how some people think repealing the helmet law is going to solve all our cycling problems, and who are willing to ascribe tons of bad things to the helmet law, even bad things about proposals that haven’t started yet!
You are barking up a single tree in a big forest, mate. Just because the tree is big doesn’t make it THE forest.
This is read and weep time. Good bikeshare is a feature of any livable city but this isn’t even a pale excuse for it, demonstrating that Auckland Transport doesn’t have a clue about cycling.
Mountain bikes? For city riding? Although typical of our sports skewed commuter cycle culture, it’s nothing like the utility bikes used everywhere else for bike share. Hullo… Mudguards? Chain guards?” Lights? Upright comfort sitting? Clueless. Who is paid to make these decisions?
And yes bikeshare schemes, otherwise massively successful (driving Seville’s cycling modeshare from 1-7% in 5 years) - have failed everywhere there is an adult helmet law.
If it’s possible, Auckland Transport has achieved it: something worse than no bikeshare.