The bottom line of Dublin's bike deal is the French advertising group takes the money while all we get is a spin in the city, writes ORNA MULCAHY
EVER SINCE the movie Vicky Cristina BarcelonaI've been hankering after a high-nelly bike of my own on which to sail around town. Dublin City Council is supposed to be supplying hundreds of them sometime soon in a "free bike" scheme that aims to bring a touch of Amsterdam or Paris to Dublin.
In fact it’s the French who are providing the wheels, courtesy of JC Decaux, a vast advertising company that did a secretive deal with the council to run the bicycles in exchange for advertising concessions throughout the city, more of which later.
Everything is ready for these bicyclettes, or should that be “yokes on spokes” as one Dublin wit has suggested. Chunks of road and pavement have been annexed for bike stations, and large pay and display pillars have reared up almost overnight and are now shrouded like some wonderful art works ready to be unveiled.
There are 40 of these stations across the inner city but still no sign of the bikes themselves. The word is that they are finally and definitively due to appear on September 13th to coincide with dreary-sounding Mobility Week. What a shame they weren’t up and running for the tourist season, or even ready this week when seven times Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong came to town for a cancer conference. I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded speeding around on one to get the wheels rolling, so to speak. Instead, with a single tweet he got 1,000 cyclists to meet him in the Phoenix Park for a tea-time spin.
The idea of free bikes harks back to the 1960s and Amsterdam’s famous white bicycle plan, in which hippies rescued old bikes, painted them white, and left them on the street for anyone to use for free. In the end all the bikes were stolen or became too decrepit to ride.
Dublin City Council has been wanting to put bikes on the streets for over 10 years, but couldn’t make sense of it financially.
It’s a lovely, people-friendly notion – putting wheels under pedestrians without causing gridlock and dangerous emissions Bikes are a quick and easy, healthy way of getting around town and oh so environmentally sound, so long as they don’t end up tangled with the shopping trolleys in the canal disturbing the swans.
Nothing, it seems, will be easier than using these velos, once you’ve registered and paid a one-off fee. After that, you simply swipe the machine with a credit card or prepaid card, and take away a bike, which can be parked at an identical station closer to your destination.
Most journeys will be short and therefore free, with charges starting after the first half-hour – if we follow the French method. Cycle around for an hour or more and it starts to get expensive. A two-hour spin in Paris costs around €10.
The bikes are supposedly “damage-resistant”, which will be a nice challenge for the local brigade of wheeler-stealers and bus-stop bashers. When Paris first got its bikes in 2007 over 3,000 bikes went missing in the first year. In Barcelona, they are regularly vandalised and left with flat tires and the bells ripped off.
Dublin, a city with an abandoned back wheel on every second pillar, can do better than that. Remember the cow parade a few years ago, with all those lovely fibreglass cows that had travelled safely across continents? Ireland was the only place they were vandalised. They were beheaded and everything. One fears for the first batch of free bikes when they do eventually appear.
It’s a full three years since the deal was agreed with JC Decaux, who have paid for the entire installation of the bike stations and will maintain and supervise them. The pay-off? Over 70 new advertising sites across the city, and all the revenue from them for the next 15 years. JC Decaux wanted more, over 100 sites in fact, but An Taisce and others objected to some of the more intrusive positions for its metropanels – big free-standing signs on pavements that can blot out signs and traffic lights. Their profits won’t be quite as grotesque as originally planned but it’s still a very good deal for them. In other cities they have to pay a fee for each bike per year, which adds up to many millions for the city coffers, but not here.
Dublin City Council must have been feeling flush back in 2006, when this was all arranged in a deal it says is too commercially sensitive to reveal in full. City manager John Tierney reckons it’s an excellent deal with the council getting back millions in free advertising space for public information messages, signposting and the like.
It’s put the value of this at about €20 million over the lifetime of the deal, and estimates the value of the free bike scheme at nearly €27 million. These are projected and notional figures that sound extremely good, but the bottom line is that JC Decaux will be getting actual cash money for its ad sites, while all we get is a spin in the city . . .