GGW has a leak from a French Canadian news site that Bixi is on the verge of signing a deal with DC.
So London will showcase for the European market, while our American neighbors, the City of Boston has purchased 2,800 bikes for 2010 and City of Washington was also preparing to sign an agreement with Bixi.
That sounds weird because it's translated from French by Google. And they don't know that Washington isn't a city - it's a District, but I'll let it slide because Montreal is so nice. The Bixi deal isn't a surprise, as it's been one of the worst kept secrets ever, and DDOT basically said they were doing it at the last BAC meeting. But it sounds like it's still not a done deal, so we wait. I expect an announcement by Christmas.
Gabe Klein was recently interviewed in the Washington Business Journal and, as usual, talked a lot about cycling.
Klein, who says he has been infatuated with wheels since he was a kid, is in the process of rolling out D.C.’s bike sharing and streetcar programs.
D.C. has had plans to couple charging stations with SmartBike docking areas. What’s the update? We are working on [a request for proposals] for charging stations. We hope to link them up with other parts of our system. Whether it’s with bike sharing or street lights, we are not sure exactly until we finish the RFP process.
The charging stations refer to electric car charging.
The rest of the article is for subscribers only, but he talks about how his father owned a bike shop and that he learned to bike before he learned to walk. He was the director of stores for Bikes USA in the 1990's. They're still hoping to expand bike sharing in the spring. He's focused on treating bikes as a primary mode of transportation instead of making cyclists fight for space on the roads. He talks about the 15th Street bike lane and how it's an experiment that they wanted to get started before it got too cold.
City Paper had a story about 15th Street. After all the calls about safety in the contraflow lane, the article focuses on a cyclist who was hit from behind (he thinks) while going north in the sharrowed lane.
For the next project, “we’re talking about a protective lane on both sides,” says Lisle.
The department is already eyeing two other corridors for expansion. One would be on M Street, near Nationals Park, in Southeast and Southwest. The other would either be on L Street or M Street downtown.
Before the new protected lane was installed, DDOT employees stood on 15th Street and counted bikers, taking note of whether they were going in the right direction and watching for other general patterns of behavior. They intend to do the same analysis again before any new lanes are completed.
I can't wait to find out what they learn. The cyclist is scraped up with a hurt hip and mangled bike, but thankfully (and this is the season for that) was not hurt worse.
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