INTERVIEW | DUBLINBIKES
first year we added 100 bikes so we currently have 550 bikes. My target is far more ambitious. My ambition would be to get 5,000 bikes to cover the city. Because it’s been so successful I think there’s now ‘buy-in’. When I first made the proposal there was huge cynicism. Thankfully that has now died away and there’s huge support for the scheme. It’s easier to get politicians to stump up the money.
How many more stations will you need to accommodate those bikes? I’d say about 300 stations.
That’s a massive upgrade – have you got a timeline for your plans? I think it will take about five years. By the end of June next year, I’d like to see an extra 1,000 bikes to bring us up to 1,500 bikes.
Have you seen a fall in congestion with the rise in dublinbikes users? We actually have seen a fall in congestion this year, but whether that’s because our economy hasn’t done too well… As it happens we have had a fall in congestion.
London’s hire scheme has a headline sponsor in Barclays – is that something you’d consider for dublinbikes? Well the scheme is paid through advertising. We have put up 70 new advertising structures that have rotating ads in them – they paid for the bikes.
cities and hasn’t been so successful in Dublin; one of many ideas I was bringing in to try and encourage people to cycle. A spin-off benefit is of course that people are fitter but really it’s about public transport – making it easy for people to get around our city. It’s about mobility.
Why has it been so successful? Or is it simply that cycling is the best way to get around Dublin? I think there are a few factors. Firstly, we designed it very well, I think. We put our stations in two areas – where people are living and where people were working. We connected proper journeys. Other people would have thought instinctively that you put them in tourist locations, but we didn’t do that. We concentrated on connecting residential and work areas. Other things too – where we’d improved the safety of cycling in the years leading up to it – in 2007 we brought in a ban on HGVs in the city centre, so it became a lot more cycle friendly and people were more open to the idea of cycling in the city. The other thing we did was to make it very
cheap. It’s only €10 a year to join the dublinbikes scheme – I think the London scheme is £40 or so for a year. You’d be mad not to join dublinbikes.
You've just released an impressive set of statistics on the second anniversary of the scheme, but have you now got any specific target in mind for dublinbikes? We started off with 450 bikes and after the
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Now because of the success of it the Government wants to put money into it so we get some funding from them. We also get some extra funding from businesses that want to have a station near them and are prepared to pay for one. So that’s a new source of funding. We’ll also have to put more advertising in to get the quantity of bikes that we want.
And I think we’ll probably look at the idea of
sponsorship now too. We’d be looking for lots of streams of revenue to get from 500 to 5,000 bikes.
Any more general aims aside from making dublinbikes bigger? An important part of the bikes is integration with public transport. Interestingly, when we created the scheme the public transport companies hadn’t thought much about bikes but now they’ve seen a huge benefit to the bikes that they weren’t expecting. It facilitates public transport – people can come on a train or tram and that doesn’t have the flexibility to get you door-to-door whereas the bikes will finish off the last mile of the journey. That’s a huge benefit for them. Now they’re very keen to have dublinbikes stations associated with their stations, whereas before they didn’t give a damn. No one was expecting it to be such a success. But now that it is a success they’re keen to get it integrated with their infrastructure – to have bike stations near their stations.
With the scheme being so successful, do you think other cities will follow your lead and model? Well, I would think other similar sized cities, for sure. Does Manchester, Liverpool or
BIKEBIZ NOVEMBER 41 Andrew Montague,
Lord Mayor of Dublin, has been a keen
advocate of cycling in the city of Dublin
Birmingham have one? If not, then they want to get on with it. What’s stopping them? For us in Ireland Dublin is so much bigger than all the rest of the cities in the country. The Government is looking at funding schemes in smaller cities – basically large towns in populations of 50,000 or 100,000. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes in those cities. I hope it does work. There was huge scepticism about Dublin so we’ve got to try it and see if it works. I’d love it if you were a member of dublinbikes you’d automatically be a member of galwaybikes, or corkbikes. So you can cycle to a train in Dublin, get the train to Cork. Get off the train and get on a bike – without having to become a member of another scheme.
DUBLINBIKES IN NUMBERS
The scheme hit its second anniversary in September 2011
Subscription total: 37,417 as at September 12th 2011
Three day ticket total: 25,655 as at September 12th 2011
Total number of journeys: 2,529,693 as at September 12th 2011
Average duration of journey: Approximately 13 minutes
Percentage of total journeys which are free (less than 30 minutes long) 95.3 per cent
Average number of subscribers per station (subscription total / 1,433) 44
Average number of subscribers per bike (subscription total / 550) 115
Busiest usage day of the previous month 6,176 rentals on Thursday September 1st 2011
Busiest usage day to date 6,281 rentals on Wednesday July 13th 2011
Bike Rotation Rate (average number of times a bike is rented per day) 9.8 for week commencing September 5th 2011
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