Collaboration with BMTC

[Sumedha Swamy]

Hello Ananth,
I stumbled upon this link thanks to your status message on GTalk. I
must say this is a very good idea. I do have a thought that the group
may want to consider:
Cycling seems a great option to get from one place to another when the
time required to get to a place is roughly not more than half an hour.
Therefore to start off the system, in addition to aiming towards a
system like Vélib', I think it would make sense to push this as a part
of a larger public transit system, which in the case of Bangalore
would be BMTC.

BMTC could provide the real-estate for parking the bikes, and people
could take a bus from/to the nearest BMTC stop and then bike from
there to the nearest Freewheeling stop. Freewheeling may therefore
start off by placing the bike stands strategically close to places
that users may be (Office workers to start with ?)

What we have achieved by this is that, although start and end
destinations could be far apart, when a large part of the distance is
covered by a bus, it is more likely that users who would previously
not have considered this system could begin using it. This also means
that BMTC makes revenue that it would not have made had this system
not been in place. Therefore, BMTC also has an incentive in supporting
this system.

I am basing this idea thru my experience while traveling on CalTrain
in the SF Bay area. While we have to get our own bikes on CalTrain,
the infrastructure for parking is provided by CalTrain.

I know that there are many more issues about logistics that have to be
worked out, but I was wondering this this thought was considered.

Thanks,
Sumedha Swamy

[Ishwar Sundararaman]

Interesting idea. This will be ideal for the metro when it eventually happens