I recently had the privilege of taking an impromptu trip to Montreal. I boarded a mega bus and arrived one summer afternoon at the gross Montreal bus station. As I walked to my inn I walked past a building that was still under construction. From the top of the building water was dripping at intervals. Creating pools of awful smelling water. It had not rained in days, so I only have my imagination to determine where the gross water came from. It was at this moment that I decided to spend less time on the Montreal sidewalks. BIXI bikes was the answer.

I had seen a few BIXI stands in Toronto and have a hazy memory of riding a BIXI in Washington DC the morning after my birthday. What I did not know until I reached Montreal is that Montreal is saturated with BIXI bikes. They are everywhere you could want to be. BIXI stands are down every side street, just around the corner from any busy intersection. They surround malls and mark the entrance to parks.There are over 5000 BIXI bicycles in Montreal. Five thousand!

I slid my credit card into a BIXI machine, got my secret code to unlock a bike and rode off. Here is how it works: you let a machine scan your credit card which gets you a secret code to unlock the bike of your choosing. Once you have a bike you can return it to any other BIXI stand. You can also get any other bike from any other stand with the same credit card. At the end of 24 hours your credit card gets billed for the time you actually had a bicycle out of the stands. Seems fair to me. Generally I was never hanging around with a bike; I would go where I wanted and put the bicycle back in the stand while I did my doing. Once I finished my coffee or beer or sunbathing in the park I grabbed another bike and went to my next destination.

These bicycles are used a lot. Everywhere you look there is someone on a BIXI bike. At night on many streets you can see the flashing headlights running off the generator. They have to be robust. Especially in Montreal traffic (I saw more than one person stop at a red light and then run it or just ignore it completely). They have to be tough and they are. They have a heavy metal frame, completely enclosed drum brakes, enclosed planetary gears (three speed), LED lights running off a generator, stiff metal handlebar basket. Being this tough has some costs though. There is a button on the stands that allow you to mark a bicycle as needing repairs. I found this button first when I took out a bicycle with a flat rear tire. That would seem to be about the only thing that can easily be broken on the bikes. The brakes however can become less than effective. The drum breaks must wear down or get infiltrated with dirt as some of them required an immense amount of pressure to stop the bike (even worse due to the weight of the frame).

Another growing pain of BIXI appears to be the scalability of their computer systems. You cannot take more than one bicycle out at a time. When you return the bike to a stand it updates a computer system somewhere saying you have returned the bike and are now allowed to take out another one. During the height of the afternoon this took more  over an hour to notify the system that I had return a bike. I had returned it to take a different one because the brakes did not work. I called their support number and they admitted that the system gets extremely slow and they could not even check it out because it was too slow for them to login. This could probably be solved with a little better IT support.

These issues are just from the popularity of the bikes. If they were not used so damn much they would not be worn or slow updating your rental status. Despite being used so much I never encountered a BIXI stand that was completely empty or one that was too full to return a bicycle. I cannot even remember the pricing scheme, but I ended up only paying $6.50 while going back and forth all day -- seems like I paid too little.