Trouble in Bixiland


Trouble in bixi-land














Trouble in Bixiland

  1. more idiocy down on the bike lane. the worst mayor Vancouver ever had is sure to jump on this fools bandwagon. if wishes were bicycles, beggars would ride. 

  2. Very informative article, but the problems goes beyond Montreal. The Bixi service in Melbourne, for example, has proven very unpopular (according to a La Presse article a while back), while London’s Bixi service seems to be having its own adminstrative problems.

    (A minor point, “Riders pay per minute.” In fact, riders pay per half-hour of use in Montreal, but I’m not sure how it works in other cities. Perhaps Toronto charges per minute?)


    Wow, I guess if an idea sounds like it’s “green” all the lefties in governement will fall all over themselves to throw money at it.

  4. Similar idiots at the National Capital Commission and City Hall in Ottawa are moving in to this area as well. Trying hard to put a private operation of 17 years or so out of business. None of these people have ever had to generate wealth and don’t care anyway because it’s someone else’s money.

  5. It sounds to me like the big problem is that Bixi’s corporate structure is prohibiting it from obtaining the economies of scale necessary to break even.  If it could put systems into multiple cities, it could rely on the same equipment base (bicycles, stands, etc.) in all of them, reducing the per unit cost, plus the ability to spread the cost of R&D, corporate management, etc., over a larger system.  But, if it’s strictly limited to Montreal, then that’s not going to work.  

    All of which is to say, those pointing to this as “proof” that all green initiatives are pie-in-the-sky white elephants, you have to look deeper into the economics of the specific deal.  Even this case seems to be far more complicated than “Bixi can’t make a profit”, since there are extraordinary legal limits on what Bixi can do to try to make a profit.

  6. $7400 per bike is what Bixi wants from the city.  How many decent bikes can you buy for $7400?
    I’d tell ’em to get stuffed.

    • Exactly, you could buy a bike for every person in Montreal with that kind of money. 

  7. We have already seen articles in the US right wing advertisingandnews media panning our made-in-Canada Bixi programme.  And just like the US press, Macleans has made errors in reporting the fee structure structure and financial arrangements.  It leaves this reader wondering if there are competitive interests (such as the petromotors industry) that are attempting to exploit our press to undermine Bixi.

    • It’s a vast right-wing conspiracy.

  8. I am a Montrealer who is proud of Bixi, and the “anti-green” comments here are knee-jerk partisanship.  Bixi is a popular and an excellent idea, and gets a lot of cars of the street in a commuter-friendly way.

    The article and Auditor are right on that very basic economics were not done (sadly par for the course:  Welcome to Montreal, land of the totally unsupervised mega-project!).  The cost of a Bixi for a Montreal commuter was radically subsidized to help it take off.  Now it’s taken off, let’s get the pricing up.  

    I pay $73 per month for my Metro pass to take the subway to work, $876 annually.  Bixi users pay a tiny fraction of that.  If they simply make it comparable, a lot of this shortfall will go.

    I also do not understand why they do not simply amend the law to allow this company to make money, as it is a unique situation and a highly exportable local technology (Plus, Quebec usually  loves amending laws to promote Quebec).  If they can get the scale up with other cities, they may be able to get an economy of scale….


    Probably the moment Monsieur le maire said Bixi was a “victim of its own success.”  Notice no heads have rolled except that of Jacques Bergeron?

  10. Clearly Bixi is having some financial trouble. Regarding your comment: “Riders pay per minute” This is false. With a yearly membership you can have as many rides under 30 minutes as you wish. This is usually plenty to complete the last section of your commute or get to another part of town. This is the norm for almost all VLS/bike share systems in the world. Obviously the author had yet to use the system. You should probably correct this.

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