Bike-sharing Bikes Should Have Baskets, Child Seats
If you’re going to do a bike-sharing system, you might as well do it right. I noticed a bunch of bike-sharing systems provide real baskets (Hangzhou), and some just provide a weird type of rack that seems designed to make people lose things (Washington, DC).
Here’s a shot of a typical Hangzhou bike — with a real basket:
And here’s one of a typical DC bike — with a fake ‘basket’:
Cabi bike 'baskets
At least some of the bike-share bikes in Hangzhou have child seats — here’s a younger child being carried:
And here’s an older child being carried:
Hopefully the major bike-sharing providers are also thinking about adding other niceties like coffee/drink cup holders, etc.
Hat tip: @BikeToWorkBook.
Update: I emailed a few folks involved with Hubway, Boston’s bike share system-to-be, including Alta Bicycle Share (who will be running the system), Bixi (whose bikes will be used), Nicole Freedman (Boston’s bike point-person), Eric Bourassa (from the Boston-area Metro Area Planning Council), and a couple of other folks — and to their credit, almost everyone has gotten back to me already. I heard that the bikes a) won’t have child seats, but that b) ‘people would be contacted’, and that c) ‘there are liability issues’.
Well, life is filled with ‘liability issues’ — the question is, what do you have against parents? What do you have against single moms and single dads? What do you have against some of the most cash-strapped people in our society? Are these bikes toys, or are we trying to allow people to actually live without being dependent on motorized transport, either private automobile or public motorized transport? We know that if we want bikes to become a real option for a majority of people, then we have to cater to everyone — everyone everyone, not just ‘everyone who is childless’.
And, anyone that was around for the early days of this petition knows that ‘liability issues’ was one of the main reasons cited by haters as to why “Google would never do this” — well, we know what happened with that.
Sydney has a ‘bike library’ — The Watershed Bike Library — to help parents get their kids and cargo around town — same concept. If it’s good enough for Sydneysiders, it’s good enough for Bostonites.
Update: The Bixi bikes have those pseudo-baskets with bungee cords because regular baskets “end up full of trash”. OK, no system is perfect, but we should definitely consider at least experimenting with some baskets, maybe even making them semi-transparent. Maybe each Bixi station should have built-in trash cans, complete with recycling, and a community billboard.
Update: Bixi bike ‘baskets’ useless.
