It should be easy riding for Centretown residents this spring.
Right Bike, a community bike-sharing program, plans to open a new bike hub at the Centretown Community Health Centre on Cooper Street.
Don Palmer, a self-described cycling fanatic, is the executive director of the Causeway Work Centre on O’Meara Street.
He says the planned hub is part of Right Bike’s long-term strategy to expand service across the city.
“Because cycling is becoming more popular in Ottawa, it’s easier to run a bike-share program,” he says. “The number of cyclists just keeps increasing each and every year.”
Right Bike allows members to take to the streets on signature purple cycles, borrowed from any of the city’s 16 hubs. Centretown already hosts three – one at the Somerset West Community Health Centre and two others on Waverley and Somerset streets.
Right Bike users need only walk into a hub and sign out a key.
“We wanted a bike share program that would actually encourage more face to face interaction on a street level, as opposed to Bixi where you go and your swipe a credit card and off you go,” says Palmer.
He will be watching the new Centretown hub to see how well the community takes to the program.
“It’s a pretty hard road to home making bike share programs sustainable. Even the Bixi program is bankrupt and is struggling to survive. Ottawa has dropped it.”
Palmer says Right Bike is more cost-effective than Bixi, as it refurbishes donated bikes and uses local businesses as administrative centres.
Earlier this year, Right Bike received a $30,000 Better Neighbourhoods grant to expand service through Centretown, Lowertown, and the Beechwood area.
It caught the attention of Stephanie Cowan, the marketing co-ordinator at VRTUCAR, an Ottawa-based car-sharing organization. VRTUCAR’s Waverley Street location became Centretown’s newest hub in May.
“We had our eye on them (Right Bike) since last year,” she says. “When I heard that they had received a grant this year, we reached out to them to see if we could have a hub and it worked out great.”
The new hubs are part of a greater transformation taking place in Centretown’s cycling community. Bike paths are being planned for O’Connor and Albert streets this summer and the Laurier bike lane celebrated its million-ride milestone.
The city’s cycling plan has allocated $20 million to be used on biking projects between 2014 and 2019.
Zlatko Krstulic, a transportation planner at the City of Ottawa, says Centretown is one of the busiest areas for cycling within the city.
“Depending on the time of year, the Laurier bike lanes are either number one or number two as a cycling route for commuters,” he says.
He says the new cycling infrastructure has made people more comfortable biking downtown. “People use the bike more,” he says. “A person mentioned that they take their kid to daycare on the Laurier bike lanes and they wouldn’t have done that before.”
Palmer hopes Right Bike will grow to become a city-wide program. Already, he’s found one new rider: Cowan. She credits VRTUCAR’s partnership with Right Bike with her newfound interest in cycling.
“I hadn’t been on a bike in a while and I loved it,” she said. “It kind of reopened my eyes about biking.”