A Seattle official is warning Vancouver what not to do when launching a bike-share program, after the U.S. city faced the possible collapse of its own initiative.
A city councillor said about the problems Seattle's program faced in its first year of operation, saying that the system required "a lot of fine tuning."
The City of Vancouver plans to launch the first phase of a similar program in June.
Seattle launched its program with 54 stations and 500 bikes available to rent, but faced ridership lags almost immediately.
"It was a new venture. Seattle hasn't done bike-share before. It takes a while to figure out," City Coun. Mike O'Brien told CTV News.
Organizers estimated the bikes would be used approximately 450,000 times in the program's first year, but the bikes were only used 150,000 times by the end of 2015.
"There's a lot of fine tuning we can do to make our existing system work better," O'Brien said.
A little more than a year after launching, Seattle's bike share program was on the brink of failure when city officials stepped in with a bailout.
The city took over from the nonprofit organization that managed the bike share, and injected an additional $1.4 million in taxpayer dollars into the program. The extra cash helped to put more bikes on the roads.
"When we have a bigger system, we will certainly have many more riders and many more trips," Seattle Director of Active Transportation Nicole Freedman said.
Bike-share programs in Montreal and Toronto faced similar issues, and had to be bailed out by provincial investments to avoid total collapse.
Both cities launched bike-share programs through Bixi, a company that filed for bankruptcy protection in 2014. Montreal provided $37 million in loans to Bixi, and another $11 million for the company that managed the service.
A year later, the Ontario government contributed $4.9 million to expand Bike Share Toronto.
A Vancouver city councillor said organizers have learned from pitfalls in cities like Seattle.
"I don't like to say they made a mistake, but they started with a very small system," Coun. Heather Deal told CTV.
Deal provided few details, but said the city is "very confident" that the program will work in Vancouver.
"You really need to have the appropriate number of bikes in the appropriate area, so we're going with a much denser system than they did."
The program will launch its first phase in June, with 1,000 bikes and 100 stations. The bike fleet will grow to 1,500 by the end of the summer, with 150 stations. Vancouver's $5-million program is expected to be the largest smart bike share system in North America.
With files from CTV Vancouver's Scott Hurst
