“There are a lot of [bike-sharing] systems out there and we really want to pick the best model.”
–Shoshanah Oppenheim, transportation policy aide for Commissioner Adams
With the announcement last week that the City of Portland has canceled their search for a bike-sharing vendor, some are wondering what’s next in Portland’s public-bike future.
Far from giving up on the idea, Commissioner Sam Adams’ office says just they’re taking a new approach.
Adams’ transportation policy staffer Shoshanah Oppenheim told me that, once they began to “delve into the meat of the responses” to their Request for Proposals (RFP, which was sent out on July 17, 2007), “it was clear we needed to do more analysis.”
Oppenheim says the legal restraints of the RFP process tied the hands of the committee formed to choose a vendor. “Under the contraints of the RFP,” she said,
“we can’t talk to potential providers and continue to learn from them… it was hindering our ability to do the analysis we wanted to do to make sure the program was the right style and scope that would work for Portland.”
Oppenheim spoke to the complexity of rolling out a public bike-sharing system. Commissioner Adams just returned from a trip to Stockholm (and other places) to observe their transportation infrastructure and even that system, she said, “has a lot of flaws”.
“There are a lot of [bike-sharing] systems out there and we really want to pick the best model.”
She’s right. Choices for bike-sharing systems abound. The most successful to date has been Paris’ “Velib“, but cities all over the world already have programs in place (or are planning them). The Bike-Sharing Blog has created a Google Map mash-up of them all.
If Portland can’t find the right vendor, perhaps we should just design, create, and manage the system ourselves? The city of Montreal did, and it looks to be a winner. Their recently launched “Public Bike System” boasts modular racks and kiosks, uses wireless techonology, and is solar-powered.
Oppenheim didn’t offer any hints on which direction Portland would go, but added that mayor-elect Adams is, “committed to a system that is effective”.
To that end, Oppenheim says this time around they’ve assigned a project team staffed by PDOT employees to do further analysis and “go deeper” into how to successfully implement the system.
Oppenheim wouldn’t put a date on when another RFP would be issued, but said they would put another one out once they’ve completed their internal research.
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For more on Portland’s bike-sharing quest, view the coverage archives.