The basic idea is this: there are automated bike rental stations (solar-powered) every few blocks. Each station has 5-10 bikes in them. You slide in a credit card, it charges you $5 for 24-hour access (or you can go on the website and get a monthly pass for $28 or a year-round pass for $78), and you get a code to unlock one of the bikes. The bike is then yours for as long as you like. It's no extra charge for the first half-hour and then increases up to a maximum of $6 depending on how long you keep it out for. When you're done, you just put the bike back into any of the stations scattered throughout the city.
They're setting the stations up in Montreal right now. They've probably only got ten percent or so of them working and/or present at the moment, but I already can't describe how excited I am about this thing. Yesterday I went with a friend, rented one of these bikes, and pedaled around downtown, down by the Atwater market and the Lachine canal, and had a lovely picnic. I had a movie to see, so we went back into downtown...and dropped the bike off right in front of the movie theater.
This morning I had some errands to run, so I walked to my first errand, grabbed a bike from the station a block away from it, took a lovely ten minute ride into downtown to the bank, dropped the bike off across the street from the bank, fulfilled my financial duties, grabbed another bike from the same station, headed to my other errands...and you can probably get the picture. Since they were all short rides, I paid nothing over the $5 I had paid the day before for 24 hours. I paid $11 total for getting the bike for an entire afternoon/evening and getting to run a bunch of errands all over the city the next morning--not much more expensive than the metro, and if I had the yearly pass I could do that as much as I wanted.
I really hope I'm not the only one who thinks this is the greatest idea ever. Why the hell would I take the metro if it's one of those iridescent Montreal summer days and I could take a lovely little ride downtown? Set up enough of these stations and make it convenient and cheap enough, and you could probably reduce congestion on the public transit system and maybe, because it's much more personal than a metro or bus, get people out of their cars. I already saw some well-heeled business types buzzing around downtown on them, and since Montreal already has some very safe bike paths that go straight through the middle of the city, I could see that becoming a fairly regular occurence if they spread the stations out into the suburbs.
Plus, the bikes are futuristic and sexy-looking. That's always important.
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