logloglog

A. and I tried out Bixi today. I used my own bike but for A. we wanted to get a Bixi.

We went to “our” Bixi station and I tapped the solar powered touch screen. Two icons were visible, one of it disabled. After I tapped the big icon I was presented with the screen shown above. There appear to be 50 pages of this legalese text, with Article 1 to x, in either English or French. Rather overwhelming, and maybe at the page 10 there are instructions, but I never clicked through so far.

Instead I just put my credit card in the credit card slot.

After a short while two other icons appeared, but before I could figure out what they meant (there is plenty of room to add a text next to it, and after 50 pages of text one or two words would be really helpful here) the printer printed a ticket. It had a 5 digit code on it, and a pictogram how to enter it. After a moment of confusion I found out that next to each bike there was a small keypad where one would punch in the code. The code contains only the numbers 1, 2 and 3 only, so it’s not to hard to do. I entered the code and a red light started flashing. Not good. After three more tries we entered the code in another bike’s keypad and finally it worked: a green light lit up, the lock released and the Bixi bike was ours to use.

We adjusted the saddle and off we went. It was A.’s first ride in the city in decades, so we started on a quiet residential street. The steering of the bike is a bit “nervous” but after a while she got used to it. She liked that the centre of gravity was very low.

Our destination was the Jean-Talon Market about 1.5 km away. I had a iPhone map that linked to the map on the Bixi website that supposedly shows realtime information about the amount of Bixi’s available at every station. More importantly, it shows how many free spots there are at each stand. Because the Bixi has no lock, and after 30 minutes of “free” use it gets really expensive. If you’d use the Bixi for three consecutive hours a whopping $16.50, on top of your $5 daily fee, would have been charged to you credit card.
In order to not break the bank you have to bring back the Bixi bike to a station within 30 minutes. Fortunately you then can immediately get another bike, and use it for free for the next half hour. But this means there should be stations, with free spots, at regular intervals, otherwise you are more or less stuck.

According to the map that I checked when we left home there were 7 free spots at the Henri-Julien/Jean Talon stand. There was none. I checked the map again on my iPhone, and it still said 7 free spots. Next stand, 300 metres further away on Chateaubriand/Bélanger. According to the map, 5 free spots. In reality, none.
Finally we found one free spot on the Bréboeuf/Jean-Talon stand, 800 metres from our destination, but in another direction. Again, the map said there should have been many free spots, and there were only two. Since this bike station was almost nearer to our house than to the Jean-Talon Market we felt kind of cheated.
We decided to cancel our visit to the market and instead to go back home. In order to do that we needed to unlock another bike. I typed in the code from my ticket but got a red light. We tried all bikes but none of them would unlock. The code-ticket had a phone number on it that I called for assistance. After a short wait a man answered me in very poor English and told me to swipe my card again and I would get a new number.

Of course! The old code was only valid for that station, and had expired after I unlocked the bike. But swiping your credit card repeatedly feels quite dangerous, especially because there is absolutely no feedback on the amount actually charged. (I still don’t know, since my online credit card record shows no charge at all.)

Again, some printed instructions, either on the pay kiosk or on the ticket would have been immensely helpful. They might have been there, but buried in a 50 page puddle of legalese, it’s unlikely that anybody would find them.

After I swiped my card again, I got a new code (I now figured out the two icons meant print code and show code on screen), unlocked a bike and rode back home.

So our first experience with Bixi wasn’t that positive. The bikes are great, but the information how to use it isn’t great,worse, it’s almost non-existent.

Also, if the information on the Bixi website is not correct and up-to-date, you can’t plan a trip. Without my iPhone, I wouldn’t even have known the locations of the “nearby” stations. A printed map on all the stations showing the nearest stations would be a really obvious solution here.

Bixi is nice, but you shouldn’t want to use it to go to a destination, like the Jean-Talon market, or a cinema downtown or things like that. Chances are that you can’t drop off your bike and either you pay a lot of money or have to walk quite a bit. Or both. I later learned there is an icon that becomes active when the station has no free spots left that will extend your half hour with 15 minutes so you have time to find a station that does have room to drop off your Bixi. But since the icons have no text there is no way you would know. When there is no room for your bike you don’t go to the touch screen to find a solution. At least I didn’t.

The ratio between bikes and stations is not good. On the Bixi website they talk about 3000 bikes and 300 station. Most stations don’t even have 10 places, so when nobody uses a Bixi, like at night, all bikes should be parked and everybody should have put them perfectly very spread out over the network. That isn’t going to happen. Realistically there should be two or three times more parking spaces than bikes.

And then there are those instructions: 50 pages of legalese interspersed with instructions is just ridiculous. Quebec user interface designers are either terrible, or those things are designed by the son of the director who is studying graphic design at a Cegep. I have no idea. The same applies to the interface design of the STM Opus terminals, but that is another rant.

I know Bixi is still in its infancy and not completely rolled out yet, but many of the above points are basic design flaws that could have been easily avoided.

For know, I don’t think A. will get a Bixi pass for her birthday, and not only also because she told me she would never use it to go to work downtown. She has more reasons than the ones pointed out above but still.

In the winter a water pipe broke under the porch that feeds the outside tap. I had drained the pipe and the tap was wide open but the pipe was slightly sagging and at its lowest point it froze, expanded and burst. Fixing it wasn’t a lot of work, but I had to crawl under the porch and it stinks of cat pee.

The pipe is fixed now, and A. can water the plants and I can use the hose to wash my car. Uhm no, I don’t wash the car, I haven’t done that since I bought it. I’m such a bad person.

Next year I’ll make sure to completely blow or suck all the water out of the pipe.

[Update]

A asked:

So, like, how did you know the pipe had burst?

And how did you fix the pipe?

I found out when I opened the valve and the water bursted out. Finding water leaks is usually not very hard. Leaking water makes a lot of noise. Gas leaks also make sound, but by the time they get loud it is usually too late.

I fixed the pipe by cutting out the piece of pipe shown above with a pipe cutter and by a putting new piece of pipe in it’s place connected with two lugs that I soldered.

Bixi is Montreal’s new shared bike system and it was recently rolled out. Not all bicycle stands/stations were installed immediately but according to this sign they were going to install a Bixi station 150 meter from our house last Saturday. These stations install very fast. They are solar powered and after they are lifted of a truck they require just a few bolts and that’s it.

But somebody in the street thought it was wrong and glued this note on both of the signs:

Saturday came and went and no Bixi station was installed.

Sunday came and went and no Bixi station was installed. 

Monday came and went and no Bixi station was installed. 

Tuesday came and went and no Bixi station was installed. 

But finally, on Wednesday, a big truck came and dropped off this station. The bikes were added today. It is not installed in the original location (which would have cost two parking spaces) but, just as the note asked/said, on the other side of the intersection. So now it’s 170 metres from our house. We have many stations nearby, another one is 200 metres in the other direction, and there’s a third a bit further away, almost 400 metres, near the park.

This weekend I’m going to convince A. to make a test ride. And if it’s a success she might get a Bixi pass for her birthday. Or a bike.

If you have an iPhone or iPod you might want to check this site to get an interactive map that you can load in Google Maps which shows the location of all 300 stations and how many bikes (or free spots) are available at every station. Because some stations are at times totally empty and others are totally full, which is a problem when you either want to get a bike or want to drop one off.

I’ve been so busy lately that I totally forgot to announce on logloglog that my iPhone application is no longer a secret. Apple finally approved it and it’s now for sale at an iTunes Store near you. If you are fast you can still get it for free, because I decided to give it away for the first couple of days. Afterwards it will be $0.99 or the equivalent in your local currency.

The star of the application is of course Poupoune. She works under a stage name, as do the other cleaners. That way we can make things up on their weblogs, because these are modern times and all cleaners have weblogs and Twitter accounts.

Here is the website, so you can check it out for yourself. Even if you don’t have an iPhone or iPod touch you can still watch the demo video, also presented by my favourite dog.

A lot of blood, sweat and tears went into the making of this and I hope you, and a lot of other people, like it. I really hope this is going to be a success since I need to pay a few of people who helped me with this, and it would be nice if I could pay myself a little too for all the hours (many hundreds!) I worked on this.

Oh, and you could really help me if you write a review in iTunes for me. You don’t even need an iPhone or iPod for that.

We went for a walk on Mont Royal (the mountain) before A. was taking a flight to Winnipeg. The mountain was literally covered on Trillium. I always think Trillium sounds like something straight out a science fiction movie like Star Trek or Superman, but it actually is a plant with three leaves coming out of the stem at one point and also triangular shaped flowers. It’s the official flower of Ontario, and protected as an endangered species. Not endangered at all on our mountain though, but probably protected anyway.

Poupoune loves running around them, sniffing for… I don’t know but it smelled good to her.

I haven’t been posting a lot, I make mini posts on Twitter and that’s about it. Here are some updates:

I am still voiceless and totally out of shape. My lungs still aren’t 100% and I cough when I whisper too much.

Not speaking isolates me a bit. I haven’t seen my friends in a while at first I because didn’t want to infect them, and if you can’t speak there is not much point anyway. You’d think I should email them but for some reason I don’t.

I’m anxiously waiting until my secret iPhone application passes through Apple’s totally opaque approval process. They rejected it once for a stupid reason, but I changed it (albeit grumpily) and now I have to wait again. In the mean time I work on the website that accompanies the application, and I’m even adding some new features for the next version.

The moment things go “live” I’ll let you know.