Tag Archives: BIXI

Creative Parking, Summer Edition

During the winter, when huge snowbanks are blocking the sides of streets, I've noticed many drivers like to bend the rules when it comes to where they can park their cars.

In the summer, I think it's just laziness.

Bixi parking

Bixi parking (rear)

Really? You're going to park across the entire Bixi station? Do you not know what it's for? Has it not been talked about enough in the news that you don't recognize it?

I know it used to be a parking space, but you don't think the giant contraption (not to mention the red "no parking" bag over the meter post) might have been an indication not to park there?

No wonder we need garish concrete barriers installed next to these stations.

A fire hydrant at Sherbrooke and Clark forces this driver to park a bit ahead

A fire hydrant at Sherbrooke and Clark forces this driver to park a bit ahead

Then we have this guy (or girl), who decided to obey that don't-park-in-front-of-the-fire-hydrant rule but disregard that don't-park-too-close-to-intersections rule.

You'd think the fact that you have to park at an angle might be an indication you're too close to the corner.

You'd think the fact that you have to park at an angle might be an indication you're too close to the corner.

It looks like it's making a turn, but there's no one inside.

It looks like it's making a turn, but there's no one inside.

What gets me is I'm pretty sure I saw the same car parked the same way in the same space a few weeks earlier. Someone needs to give the driver a ticket or this behaviour is going to continue (or worse, spread).

Bixi confusion

A young woman checks out the Bixi terminal at de Maisonneuve and Stanley

A young woman checks out the Bixi terminal at de Maisonneuve and Stanley

A couple of weeks ago I walked through downtown on a nice day to check out the new Bixi bike rental stands. I saw a few random people go by on these new bikes and it seemed a lot of people were at least trying them out, which was good.

Among them was a young woman who spent a few minutes checking the bikes out and then decided she wanted to try them. So she went to the terminal and pressed some buttons.

Everyone's curious about Bixi

Everyone's curious about Bixi

It took a while before anything happened. Probably because Bixi has a 50-page service agreement you have to read before you can take out a bike. After a few minutes, she swiped her credit card and picked up a ticket.

The ticket didn't come with instructions, apparently, so she wasn't quite sure what to do to get the bike out. Had one been unlocked for her? Was she supposed to have a key?

A team of four couldn't free this Bixi bike

A team of four couldn't free this Bixi bike

Eventually some others tried to help her out. They tried all sorts of things, including waving the ticket in front of the machine in case it had an embedded RFID chip or something. They tried keying in the code printed on the ticket, but that didn't work either. They tried again with another bike stand.

After about 15 minutes of wasted time, she gave up and left.

I figured this was a fluke. Perhaps she had problems reading instructions, or something was wrong with the stand or something.

But The Gazette's Andy Riga had similar problems when he tried his first Bixi. Pierre Foglia had trouble too. (UPDATE June 4: Riga has more problems.)

These people aren't morons. So I'm forced to conclude that Bixi has some usability issues, particularly when it comes to the procedure of actually removing a bike from its stand.

Riga points out other problems (there's no map to nearby stations for when one is empty or full). Let's hope they're ironed out quickly, before we start seriously marketing this to tourists.

BIXI’s economics don’t make sense

I find myself agreeing with La Presse's Pierre Foglia about BIXI:

C'est seulement que je me demande à qui il s'adresse au juste. Je n'arrive pas à me faire une idée du client type du Bixi. Celui qui va travailler en vélo sur une base régulière? Me semble que celui-là va finir par s'en acheter un, un vélo de ville, non? Le touriste? Ne vient-on pas de dire que ce n'était pas un vélo pour se promener?

I like the idea of being able to rent bikes, and they seem to be getting good reviews in the technical sense (except from Foglia). But the high subscription rate and exponentially-increasing use rate make me wonder what kind of person would use this system and how.

As Foglia says, tourists will be easily turned off by BIXI because the system is designed to discourage long-time use. You can't take out a bike and bring it back a few hours later unless you want your wallet sucked dry.

Commuters, meanwhile, will find the annual subscription fee expensive. You can get your own (used) bike for $78 a year and do what you want with it. Besides, the BIXI footprint is small (I don't even have one near where I live), and a lot of people will find they're coming from or going to a place where BIXI can't go (like NDG).

I just don't get the exploding scale. It's backwards to the way economics work. You want to reward customers for purchasing something in bulk, not punish them.

Something tells me a lot of people are going to be spending half their time checking their watches and looking for the closest BIXI station to top up their ride and give themselves another half hour free. As long as they keep bringing it to a station every half hour, BIXI users can keep the bikes for as long as they want.

Does that make sense?

Right now, we're still in the honeymoon phase, with BIXI reviews from journalists who wouldn't spend more than half an hour toying with it even if it wasn't time-limited. We'll see after this year (or maybe next) whether regular people will find a use for this service.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, I support the idea behind a bicycle-rental system, even one that is partially subsidized by the government. My issue is with the fare structure that uses an exponentially-increasing scale instead of one that uses a flat per-hour rate.

Why do marketing companies hate themselves?

On Île Bigras, they don't tolerate shit.

On Île Bigras, they don't tolerate shit.

Patrick Lagacé has a column in today's La Presse (and accompanying blog post) about a fake blog put together by a marketing company to promote Montreal's Bixi bicycle rental system.

Lagacé chronicles the various methods used to pull the wool over people's eyes: fake authors with fake Facebook pages and a fake story about how they met. He tries to get professional marketing experts to denounce the practice and cites rules for marketers that prohibit astroturfing like this. Patrick Dion also outright condemns the practice.

But curiously, the company behind this fake campaign defends the blog, apparently suggesting that the creation of fictitious personalities does not qualify as deception. Lagacé rightly tears Morrow Communications a new one for that.

So why go through all this trouble?

The answer is mentioned in passing by André Morrow:

"Si on avait fait un blogue hébergé par Stationnement de Montréal, personne n'aurait été intéressé."

Think about it: This guy runs a marketing company, and says that if people knew a marketing company was behind this, they wouldn't be interested, regardless of the content.

What kind of self-confidence problem must you have that you need to create fake personalities because you're convinced nobody will like you?

Of course, I reject the premise of what he's saying. I subscribe to plenty of marketing outlets. I get press releases from public transit agencies, official notices from the government, blogs from newspaper editors promoting their content, even some CNW feeds. I do this because I want the official word from the company, and in a lot of cases that's where the news comes out first.

The problem is that this stuff is informative but boring. It's not edgy or creative, won't get you talked about in the news or win any marketing awards.

But you can be creative and still be honest. Even knowing it came from a marketing agency, this video of a bike racing the 24 bus (legally) is still impressive. And there are plenty of other examples of this kind of marketing, even clearly labelled as such.

Morrow Communications needs to grow up and realize that they don't have to pretend to be someone else just so we'll like them. Be honest with us and we'll appreciate them for who they are.

A marketing company being honest ... now that's edgy.

UPDATE: More reactions in the blogosphere:

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