It’s been about six weeks since I started using the Melbourne Bike Share scheme, so I thought I would give it a write-up. CycleStyle has a write-up about the bikes in general, and BV is recording some notes about the scheme’s uptake.
Melbourne Bikeshare photo by syauqee, available under the CC-BY-SA license.
It launched in May this year but is still quite a novelty around the city. I got a couple of daily passes to give it a go, then I decided $50 for a year was a good deal and did that instead.
A few months ago I was advised that more activity would help alleviate mild pain in my wrists, unsurprising because my work and many of my hobbies involve sitting at a desk. Although I was sometimes riding to work, the ride is only 25 minutes and cycling I also find to be basically stationary for my upper body. A physio suggested walking to work, given I live in an inner city suburb.
The distance from my house to work is about 4.5km, which in theory would take about an hour, however navigating the CBD would add at least another 15 minutes. I found that walking to the edge of the CBD was a pleasant 25 minute walk almost entirely through parks, and decided to train/tram across the city for the other half of the trip.
After a while walking past the recently installed bikeshare parks and pondering these bikes, I eventually realised hey… I could ride across the city… no need to get a PT ticket at all! And actually it turns out to take about the same amount of time, or even a little quicker, when you factor in getting in and out of city loop train stations.
So now my to-and-from route looks like this:
Key: H= Home, W=Work, B=Bike :)
Pink= Walking, Blue= Cycling
Yes, there is a bike rack nearly outside the front of my workplace! The joys of working in the CBD.
Initially I would go home the same way I came in, however I found cycling up Collins St in evening traffic to be profoundly unpleasant. Collins St bike ‘lanes’ are rubbish. Around the super-stop tram stops, the lanes are just a few inches, cars hate passing cyclists, and cyclists hate cars passing too. It is really quite hairy. And traffic is so often stopped, with cars inching into the bike ‘lane’, that it doesn’t take much for a bike to be as slowed as a car.
The other factor is the hill — from Swanston St to Russell is a little bit steep! It’s nothing too bad on a normal bike, but on a 18km beast of a bike it’s just a bit much.
So my homeward route is a leisurely stroll of a ride along Southbank and the river, which is really nice. Because the bikes can’t go very fast, I feel happy just cruising along very slowly (which is about all that is safe to do on Southbank after work anyway). A couple of times some more serious-minded cyclists ride alongside me for a stretch and ask me what the bikes are like. The bikes are pretty conspicuous, so I guess you don’t have a choice but to be an ambassador.
It would be nice if there was a bike rack at Richmond station – it seems like such an obvious location, hopefully it’s on the roll-out list.
The scheme is operated by RACV (of all people). One of the side effects of using it, if you have a yearly account, is that your trips are recorded and you can view your trip history online.
This is the “dashboard” for my current trip history. They have a kind-of-almost-decent account interface… all your trips are listed, with the start and end stations, time and cost, but it would be nice if they plotted them on a map. Or let you export them in a spreadsheet for more data fun. For example.
So that’s my bike share use for commuting, in a nutshell. Have I used the bikes casually? Um… only once. Why? Because of the helmet laws, of course… And that one trip was along Southbank without a helmet, and I felt terribly guilty and endangered for the whole trip. :) Just socialisation… like wearing a seatbelt.
