Will Adrian Heaps try to sabotage Bixi?

Is Councillor Adrian Heaps going to try sabotage Bixi Toronto at City Council next week? Given his recent performance at the Public Works and Infrastructure Committee meeting, I'm a bit concerned. Does he want a public bike program that could be flourishing by next year, or does he want to delay it a few years just so his favourite company, Astral Media, can run it? And does Astral Media even want it?

If you go to the bike union website you can use their friendly green button to contact Adrian Heaps (on the right side) to ask him these important questions before next week.

A bit of history: Transportation Services and City Manager staff have been negotiating with Bixi for many months now. They finally came to a deal for 1000 bikes in 2011 (a realistic compromise that the city could safely support). At the last public works meeting Heaps made a motion to go back to square one, drop the deal with Bixi and try to negotiate with Astral Media a second time, even though it was dropped at least a year ago. As Chair of the Cycling Advisory Committee, you'd think that Heaps would have more sense to just let his own agenda die and support Bixi.

Why is Heaps stuck on having Astral provide this service? Does he still not know that Astral will not provide a public bike program for free? Jonathan Goldsbie confirmed back in 2008 that Astral would likely only want the program if the whole streets furniture for advertising contract was re-opened and renegotiated. Who knows how long that would take - years?

Goldsbie said:

Considering that Clear Channel’s and Decaux’s bike-sharing programs operate at a loss, what would Astral get out of it? According to Heaps, they’re “enthusiastic,” but it’s not yet clear “whether it’s a business model or an exercise in philanthropy.”

Jean-Francois Nion, Executive Vice President of JCDecaux North America, tells me, “To make money, you would have to charge the public a large fee, which would be counterproductive.” Alternatively, Astral could amend its contract in order to reduce its regular monetary payments to the city in exchange for the service. “Once you’ve got the contract, it’s easier to negotiate with the city,” Nion says. Given that Astral overbid for the contract (and that Decaux didn’t bid specifically because the city wanted money instead of services), this might be a backwards way of arriving at the same arrangement that Clear Channel and Decaux would have liked in the first place.

So why is Councillor Heaps willing to risk the whole program just so he can get his way? Please ask him to support Bixi rather than his own agenda.