The much-anticipated $6-million public bike share program championed by the ruling Vision Vancouver council continues to be in limbo because the city has yet to finalize a deal with the selected operator.
Mayor Gregor Robertson said recently in an interview from his office that he couldn’t provide a launch date for the program, which calls for 150 stations and 1,500 rental bicycles.
“It’s not dead yet,” Robertson said.
The mayor described the program as being in “a holding pattern,” pointing to financial concerns raised in other cities that have implemented public bike share programs.
Ensuring operator Alta Bicycle Share has found a solution to providing helmets with the bicycles — to adhere to B.C.’s mandatory helmet law —has slowed the pace of negotiations, Robertson said.
“There’s no deal struck and, therefore, no financial commitment by the city to a bike share program,” the mayor said of the system that was supposed to be in place this year.
“But staff are still working on it and watching closely what’s happening in other cities and making sure whatever deal we can get is totally solid.”
In Toronto, for example, bike share operator PBSC Urban Solutions, whose program in the city has run into financial trouble, has asked the City of Toronto to buy its bicycles and take over the service.
PBSC is the same company that Alta Bicycle Share agreed to provide the stations, bikes, helmet system and information systems in Vancouver. Alta is to serve as the program’s operator, with the City of Vancouver providing a one-time $6 million investment to buy the equipment and implement the system.
Robertson discussed the bike share program in a year-end interview with the Courier. He also reiterated the city’s need for more affordable rental housing and talked about his continued drive to end street homelessness by 2015.
The mayor said the city is on track to get people off the street and into shelters and homes by 2015, with at least six more social housing complexes to be built before that year.
The former Ramada hotel on East Hastings and the former Biltmore on Kingsway will also serve as interim housing for people living in shelters, he said.
But, Robertson acknowledged, the variables of people being moved out of single-room-occupancy hotels under renovation and people released from hospital and prisons make the homeless population difficult to predict each year. The city’s warmer climate, which attracts people from across the country, is also another variable in calculating street homelessness.
The mayor said he will continue to lobby the provincial government for a second phase of social housing for Vancouver. Robertson said the city is prepared to offer city land in exchange for provincial funding to build the housing.
December marked the end of the last full year that Robertson and his ruling Vision Vancouver team will serve in office until going into an election year in 2014. The mayor, who was first elected in 2008, confirmed he will seek re-election but couldn’t say the same for his seven Vision councillors.
“They’re all making their decisions independently,” he said. “I expect to have a strong team with tons of experience. We’ve been very stable and productive for five years and I’d love to keep providing that here at city hall.”
The election is November 2014.
