Alta Chief: Bike-Share Expansions Unlikely in 2014

Despite continually growing ridership, Alta Bicycle Share-operated bike-share systems across America will probably not be adding bikes or docks this year. The bankruptcy of Montreal-based Public Bike Share Company, known as Bixi, which developed and manufactured the equipment that Alta's systems use, has disrupted the supply chain that numerous cities were pinning their expansion plans on.

"New bikes probably won’t arrive until 2015," reports Dan Weissmann at American Public Media's Marketplace. Alta Bicycle Share's founder and vice president Mia Birk told Weissman that the last time Alta received new bikes from Bixi "must have been pre-bankruptcy." That puts expansion plans for cities including Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, DC on hold. Just those three cities had previously announced fully-funded plans to add 264 bike-share stations in 2014. New York and Boston are also looking to expand their Alta-run systems. Other bike-share systems that purchase equipment from Bixi, like Nice Ride Minnesota, have had no luck buying new kit this year.

The shortage of equipment also means that cities that had signed up with Alta to launch new bike-share systems -- notably Baltimore, Portland, and Vancouver -- won't launch until 2015 at the earliest. Ironically, new launches that were planned later, like Seattle's Pronto system, will proceed sooner, as they were designed with equipment not sourced through Bixi.

The good news is that the troubled supply chain for Alta's bike-share systems looks like it will be rebooted thanks to an infusion of capital. REQX Ventures, a company from New York City that had bid on Bixi, has been in talks to purchase a majority stake in Alta Bicycle Share, according to a report in Capital New York. This should inject new resources, allowing the bike-share operator to upgrade buggy software and overcome the hurdles imposed by Bixi's bankruptcy in time for 2015's equipment orders.