Stockholm Cyclist Holiday...

..well, it was really a business trip, but I was able to tack on a day to do an extensive tour of the city by bike. As I said in an earlier post, I'd never been in Sweden before. I found it very English-friendly. (This is good thing, as my Nordic is pretty non-existent. One of the weird things about visiting Sweden is that "Hello" in Nordic is "He!" pronounced "hey". It's tempting to just say "hey" right back, kind of comfortable and informal, until you realize that you're sending the wrong signal about which language you prefer.)

Stockholm has a lot of practical cyclists. It would not be hard to believe that (at least in the warm months) 20 to 25 8 to 10 percent of city-dwellers commute to work, or do at least some practical transportation on bikes. The city has an extensive network of bike lanes, and the sensible Swedes wear helmets in far greater proportion than I've seen elsewhere in Europe. I'd guess 50% of the urban riders I saw wore helmets, which may not sound like a lot, until you see Paris where the percentage is in the low (and I mean low) single digits.

Stockholm has a public bike-sharing system called "Stockholm City Bikes". It has been put together by Clear Channel advertising, who I think also did the Washington DC "SmartBike" system. The systems look pretty much identical: the bikes (3 speed w/ coaster brakes on the rear) are the same (see my post on SmartBike here), and the rental system is very similar, with a 3-hour usage limit. SCB is more tourist oriented, though, with a 3-day pass available (for between $15 and $20) at the central railway station.

I got a better deal than SCB, though. I got a free bike for two days from my hotel (a very nice central hotel called the Scandic Anglais). Evidently this is not unusual. The larger hotels keep a collection of bikes available for patron use, and you just check them out and a deposit is put on your hotel tab until you return them. Simple and convenient. The bikes are nothing special: one-speed "ordinaries" with rear coaster brake (coaster brakes suck, by the way) and drum brake on front, rack, mudguards, and lights. Pretty basic stuff, and not very different from what a lot of locals use on their own. Just guessing, I would say that about 50% of the locals were on "ordinaries" while the other half were on more high-tech modern bikes. I saw very few people on the SCBs. It was late September, and past the tourist "high season", so maybe that was it -- the SCBs were mainly for tourists.

The SCB website is here, but it's in the off-season now. Bikes are available only for seven months of the year, 3/31 to 10/31. I guess winters are pretty tough in Stockholm. One of my acquaintances there said he had a co-worker who put on studded tires and rode year-round, but he was considered extremely hard-core by his colleagues.

So, to document the holiday and encourage other tourist-cyclists in Stockholm, I've mapped my city tour on Google Maps below. My first day tour (8.5 miles, Friday afternoon) is in red, and my longer Saturday tour (19.5 miles) is in purple:

View Larger Map

..and, even more fun, have an annotated collection of "travelogue" photos on flickr here. You can click on the map link on each photo page to see where it was taken in Stockholm. I hope you enjoy seeing Sweden's capital by bike!

DC SmartBike vs. Paris Vélib

Today (August 14), Washington DC rolled out its public bicycle system, called "SmartBike". There are 120 bikes based at 10 different stations spread across downtown Washington DC. I'm a little dubious about how it will work, or rather I should say that the system is structured in a way that is unclear. Is the system for locals or tourists? Some aspects of the system seem to discourage tourist use, but others suggest that the system will not work all that well for local commuters.

The obvious comparison is to the Vélib system in Paris, what Parisians have cleverly nicknamed "La Vélorucion". I've had the good fortune to visit Paris 3 times in the past year, and have personally admired Vélib. Rain, shine, night, day, whatever.. you see Parisians on Vélib cycles. You see the stations everywhere. At night, you see trucks full of Vélib bikes being hauled back to the central depot for maintenance. It's really something.

Both systems, Vélib and SmartBike, are subsidized by advertising (billboard) companies in a private-public partnership with the respective city. And the bikes (Vélib top right, SmartBike center right) are not so different, urban highly adjustable upright bikes with full mudguards, and high-capacity front baskets. (The DC program for some inexplicable reason decided to go with differently-sized front and rear wheels, thus doubling their tire inventory requirements for maintenance. And, equally inexplicably, the SmartBikes have no lighting system. No doubt a cost-cutting measure.) There the similarity (such as it is) ends.

In the thematic spirit of Practical Cyclist, let's run the numbers.

Looking at the chart outlining the systems at right, we can see that it's not really fair to compare the Paris and DC systems. (Note: corrected for DC served area.) A quick glance shows that the Paris system has 170 times the bikes, 150 times the stations, and 30 times the density (the Paris system covers approximately 5.5 times the land area). Not much of a match-up there; the American sponsors are being, ahem, a little timid (understandably, I suppose).

An even more striking contrast is apparent when you compare the fee structure between the two systems. To use a bike in DC, you can go up to 3 hours free. To use one in Paris, you are charged a surcharge of 1 euro after your first 30 minutes, and the rate of surcharge increases the longer you have the bike. At 3 hours, the limit of the DC system, you've been charged over 20 bucks on Vélib!

So what's going on here?

Well, it would seem, from the economic structure shown, that the DC and the Paris systems are designed to answer different questions. The Paris system tries to answer the question, "What would a mass-transit system based on bicycles look like?" The frankly punitive surcharges that they levy are designed to get the users to use the bikes to get to their destination and get them back in service. They are trying to create a feeling of reliability, such that you can go to your nearest station and expect to find a bike to use. (Failing that, if your nearest station is out of bikes, the station density assures that there will be another one very nearby.)

The question the DC system is trying to answer is not so clear. They don't cover a broad enough area nor do they have enough density to truly serve the commuter needs. Nor do they have a bike depot at Union Station, where all the train commuters come into town. The 3-hour limit is too ahort for a work day, and seems more oriented towards a tourist use. However, the station locations are not in the right places for tourists, and tourists won't use it anyway because of the annual fee. So I'm forced to conclude that the question the DC system is trying to answer is, "What symbolic but ineffective gesture can we make to show we are a 'green' city?" or, alternatively, "What can we do to further frustrate the cabdrivers of DC?"

I think the SmartBike system could work, even given the major limitation it has (that of being situated in a non-cycling city!) I think that if they situated a huge depot at Union Station, (where they care about how bicycles look,) and situated "receptor" stations around L'Enfant Plaza and the Capitol office buildings, it could succeed locally in terms of visibility and ridership. And that would be a success, indeed.