City Cat. . .City BUZ . . . City Glider . . . Now, City Cycle !

Here is another case of BrizVegas public transport being assigned a zippy name by council’s marketing thinktank. It’s a memorable tag and it gets kudos for having continuity with the rest of our terminally deficient public transport suite. The problem is, however, that this word ‘city’ is bandied around in a smokescreen created by our council, our media and ourselves, the result being that everyone seems to forget we don’t really live in a city at all, but rather a tumorous conglomeration of suburbs.

I would like to note at this point, I am a $60-annually-paying-CityCycle-subscriber, and have trialled the scheme in a dual-pronged effort to support pedal power and better inform this rant.

And herein lies the first sting in the tail. Spontaneity is no friend of CityCycle. One needs forethought, a credit card and a letterbox in order to sign up for even the shortest of joyrides, or else the shiny, sturdy bike frames will taunt passersby from their perfect angle-parked formations. Then, upon receiving the golden ticket in the mail, the recipient is lengthily dictated to – in passive-aggressive tones – about the necessity of wearing a helmet.

Without wanting to discourage anyone from joining the slim ranks of those who have used CityCycle, there are a couple of considerations I feel ought to be taken into account prior to signing up. Need anyone be reminded that BrizVegas is blessed with a hot, horribly humid climate ? It is truly only the dedicated or foolhardy who choose to ride a bicycle in the summer heat. Donning a sweaty helmet and peddling past the industrial warehouses of Montague Road is a far cry from gliding on a Vélib’ along the Champs-Élysées in the wintertime. Similarly, the hilly charm of suburbs such as Paddington can be brutal for even the fittest of cyclists and could only be made more nauseating with a clunky hire bike.

Even without all the bureaucratic and climatic inconveniences of riding these bikes, there remains the most obvious of reasons as to the unsuitability of CityCycle to our city, being what was aforementioned about BrizVegas not actually being a city. Brisbanites (outside of the immediate CityCycle catchment) will not ride the bikes because there is no reasonable cause to. Cars are getting us around just fine. Cities with similar hire bikes schemes, such as Washington DC, Berlin, Paris, Stockholm and London possess many worthy monuments allowing tourists to pedal between them. Conversely, there’s the BrizVegas CityCycle which among its docking stations boasts . . . Southbank, New Farm Park, Kangaroo Point and that funky vegan place in Highgate Hill. Short-stay tourists will surely not hassle themselves with the convoluted and pricy subscription process, so, in its current incarnation, CityCycle must be aimed squarely at commuters travelling the yuppie trail between New farm and West End.

If it survives the scathing backlash from talkback radio and Can Do Campbell’s nemeses, CityCycle could be tweaked so it performs a limited but valid function in providing tourists a fun way to travel the river. Until then, never leave home without your helmet.