Hmm, not good news for Bixi. Alta has just announced a partnership with 8D, the former software provider for Bixi, for the “next generation” of bicycle-share operations in North America. Their news release here.
ABS-8D Partner Release FINAL-1
This comes just after my story last week on Alta Bicycle Share and its vertigo-inducing growth from a small planning and design consultancy to the only all-service bicycle-share company in North America, with contracts in four major cities and a few smaller ones.
As it turns out, four key managers left the company last year and have now set up their own bike-share consultancy as of November, with talk that perhaps Alta tried to be too many things to too many people. I didn’t include in the story some of the labour-relations problems Alta has had in Washington or the reporting that’s been done here and here on their close ties to transportation staff in Washington and Chicago, cities where Alta was chosen as the system.
I did finally get to talk to Alta vice-president Mia Birk last week, who said that some of what happened is just part of the challenge of growing rapidly. She said the company is hoping to get Vancouver’s system in place for 2014. And Birk, who in the early years of bike-share had expressed some skepticism about its viability as a major transportation mode said she’s now an ardent supporter.
“At the beginning, I was skeptical that bike-share would really be a game changer and, for cities faced with limited budgets, I questioned whether this was the top choice” for where to spend money. She said that skepticism vanished when she saw how successful Capital Bikes was when the company launched it in Washington.
Birk said it’s natural there have been some delays in the systems Alta has launched in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland and Vancouver.
“The systems we are launching, it’s like launching a transit system. It’s very complex. There’s a lot that has slowed things down, things that have nothing to do with Alta.”
So … waiting, waiting here.