ISUDA Bike Share Design Competition is attracting a fair bit of mentioning in the well know design site Core77 and The AtlanticCities.
One of the entries (Asta Sad) of Isuda bike share design competition host by Bicycle Design

Although the number of design entries is not as many as we anticipated, there are some really interesting and inspiring ideas submitted.
You can take a look at Bicycledesign and vote for you winning entry.

ISUDA is proud to be the bike share partner to be exhibited in the HDB road show. The “GreenPrint” is an important initiative by HDB to bring sustainable living into existing HDB estates. It covers the Yuhua neighbourhood, consists of 38 blocks and 3194 flats (Blk 209-240 Jurong East Street 21).

Community Engagement (Green community project, Community Garden)

HDB residents visit Greenprint road show

The GreenPrint is a multi-pronged approach to facilitate change of behaviour to adopt more eco friendly living. It includes 7 initiatives:

Waste Management (e.g. Pneumatic Refuse Collection System, Save-As-You-Recycle)
Energy Conservation (Solar panels, LED lights, Regeneration Lifte, Fuel Cell)
Save Electricity (Green Home Package, Awareness of electricity consumption of electrical devices)
Water Conservation (Rainwater harvesting system, Water saving awareness)
Green Commute (Bike paths, Share Bike, Car sharing, Secured bicycle park)
Greenery (Green Roof top and Green Wall)

HDB residents visit Greenprint road show

Bicycle share program is to encourage residents to take up “Green Commuting”. Drive less, cycle more! To support this initiative, there will be one kilometer off-road bicycle path to be complete by 2014. The new bicycle path will be connected to a 22.5 km PCN and intra town cycling path to Taman Jurong and Jurong Lake area. New bicycle parking facilities are to be installed to make parking of bicycle easier and more secure. All of these effort to make it easy for the residents to “Save Time, Save Money and Improve Fitness!”

What do you think about these effort to make cycling easier? We want to hear your opinion about Bike share.

HDB Greenprint launch in TV news:

This mesmerizing animation is created by visualisation specialist Jo Wood at City University in London. He based it on data from the first 5 million journeys pedalled in the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme since its launch in July 2010.

“[Visual analytics] allow transport planners and organisations such as Transport for London to make better informed decisions to support the movement of people around our cities,” says Wood. The next level, says Huddart, is to add anonymised user profiles to the data. This would give more information about people’s use of the bicycles over time, which could lead to better placement of new docking stations and help balance load across the network, says Jo.

“Around the 1-minute mark, structure emerges from the chaos and three major systems become clear: routes around, and through, the lozenge-shaped Hyde Park in the west, and commutes in and out of King’s Cross St Pancras in the north and between Waterloo and the City in the east. In the animation, the curve of a route indicates the most frequent direction of travel: trajectories leave a station in a straight line and then hook into their destination. We can see that more people cycle to King’s Cross, for example, than from it. Similarly, more people cycle from Waterloo – typically to destinations around the City – than towards it. It’s not yet clear why this is”. says collaborator Andrew Huddart, also at City University.

ISUDA Bike Share Competition

I am excited to announce that ISUDA Bike Share is collaborating with James Thomas’s BicycleDesign.net to search for a new design that is optimized for bike share purposes. I am a big fan of the James Blog since I was working in Philips Design. His blog was started in 2005 and is followed by many product designers and students who are interested in bicycle design. Bicycledesign.net has been the place for discussion of design in the bicycle industry too. All types of bicycles (and other human powered machines) are covered, from the latest high-end road and mountain bikes to transportation oriented bikes and unique utilitarian designs. There are also occasional product reviews as well as my thoughts about cycling and bicycle advocacy related issues.

Two years ago bicycledesign.net organized a bicycle design competition for “commuting” and the response was phenomenal. A lot of interesting ideas were submitted and the quality of critique by the jury and comments from the readers were truly inspirational. When James ask what should the topic for the next design competition, many readers commented they want to see more practical and producible winning design that could have a real impact on transportational cycling. So I proposed to James about a design competition for ISUDA Bike Share. I am glad that he is very open to the idea. Even more exciting, he invited one of my hero designer Mark Sander to be part of the jury. Mark designed a few famous folding bikes including the very popular Strida. On my side I managed to link up with Professor Yap Fook Fah from Nanyang Technology University, Singapore. Prof. Yap designed the Airnmal bicycle when he was studied in UK. Talking to him I notice he is a very humble person but very inspirational. I know some of his students still remember his course, after 20 years!

So what is special about ISUDA bike share that request a different bicycle design? You see, typical bicycle for bike share currently are quite bulky and heavy, it is for riding comfort, durability and to discourage theft. However, heavy bicycle makes transportable of the bicycle very labour intensive and harder to climb slope. The key innovation of ISUDA Bike Share is the idea of using mobile station to facilitate smooth redistribution of the share bikes. Therefore a light weight bicycle will make a lot of sense. Additionally, for durability and ease of maintenance, we encourage designers to look for weather proof and rust proof material, which will also gives a very different take for the design.

Please go to BicycleDesign.net ISUDA Bike Share Design Competition to read more about the design competition.

Little Green Dot is a news show produced by seven broadcast journalism students from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, for the United Nations Environmental Programme, Youth Climate Report. The news show investigates what Singapore is doing to help save the environment in the area of transport. Stories include: CNG Taxis, Electric Cars and Isuda Bicycles.
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More about Isuda in News

Straits Times, Sunday Time 2012-06-10
The founders of Isuda, a pilot bicycle-sharing project based at one-north, want to take their idea to more places. Mr Francis Chu, 51, and Mr Michael Zhan, 30, are working with tertiary-level students to start similar initiatives on their campuses. They are also in talks with some companies and government agencies to expand their programme to other areas of Singapore.
Bike-sharing schemes allow commuters to get from the train station to their destinations without having to walk or wait for a shuttle bus.
But unlike programmes in London and Paris which have fixed docks, Isuda features moveable docking stations.
Read more at Straits Times online.

Could Central London’s 20-month-old bike sharing scheme provide a model for Singapore’s CBD?

Photo by Jess Hurd Copyright © MediaCorp Press Ltd

This is the question posted by Cheow Xinyi, the reporter who traveled to London to check out the Boris bike.

“Barclays Cycle Hire is operated and funded by Transport for London (TFL), the body responsible for the city’s public transport system, with partial sponsorship by Barclays Bank. Can Singapore replicate such a model in its central district? After all, cycling is growing in popularity and official support has increased, with the Government having pledged S$43 million to improve cycling infrastructure islandwide under the National Cycling Plan.”

“While biking enthusiasts Today spoke to debated the viability of a public bike sharing scheme, at least one group of private investors is determined to put the model to the test in an urban workplace context by piloting a project at one-north in the next couple of months.” – Yes that’s ISUDA she is mentioning!

Read more about her report directly from TODAY online.

Will Singaporean’s pilot scheme take off?
PRODuCT designer and avid cyclist Francis Chu has come up with his own innovative twist on the bike sharing system, for his upcoming pilot project at one-north: The docking stations aren’t fixed, but mobile.This tackles one of the problems faced by the London project. Mr Chu explained that during peak hours, most bike sharing systems will have logistics teams undocking bicycles from the endstations and transporting them by trailer back to the start stations, where they have to unload and dock the bicycles one by one.
“This is obviously very expensive and takes a lot of effort. The window of opportunity is not that great because peak hour is limited — the faster you can recycle the bicycles, the more people can
use them,” he said.
“What we have come up with is a station integrating storage with the docking of the bicycles. The station itself is on wheels. When the trailer is full, we just close the door the whole station
is ready to go,” said Mr Chu who, with five other investors, pumped S$100,000 into the scheme.
Besides making short point-to-point journeys, Mr Chu hopes his pilot scheme, called “Isuda” (or “easy, fast and access” in Mandarin), will also encourage commuters to use cycling as a “lastmile connection” between a bus terminal or train station and their workplace.
His group has secured approval for the scheme from JTC Corporation, one-north’s landlord, and is running a trial with “one or two users”. They hope to price the scheme at S$20 a month for
unlimited use, with incremental charges for the duration of each ride.
ERASING A STIGMA
“There is the perception of … riding a bike for commuting as only appropriate for foreign labourers. That is a stigma that will take some time to erase,” he says.
“One of the reasons that one-north is a good location to start with is the mix of people who work there — there is a high proportion of foreigners but these are researchers and usually highly
educated; they do not associate cycling with this stigma but, rather, they see it as a greener and efficient mode of transport.”
Why not approach the authorities for funding to make it a national scheme?
“We want to be independent and have the freedom, and progress at our own pace. Of course, if there are schemes or funds that are in line with what we are doing, there is no harm in us
approaching the authorities.” (The group is, meanwhile, in talks with the Land Transport Authority for permission to run the scheme on land not belonging to JTC and to clarify traffic regulations
for cycling.)
Essentially, Mr Chu’s aim is to make bike sharing profitable by reducing the operating costs.
“The reason why London’s and Paris’ bike-share schemes need sponsors is because it’s a very expensive operation. If we can make a small profit, then bike share can be expanded in an organic
way,” he said, citing hopes of expanding the scheme to the Central Business District someday.
‘STILL IN ITS INFANCY’

To cycling enthusiast Ryan Li, the challenge of implementing a bike share scheme in the CBD is the need to balance space for human traffic with space for cyclists, given how built-up the area is.

“Most people cycling to the CBD to work are experienced riders cycling on the roads. Unless there is really a cycling lane catered for on the pavements, it will be quite a challenge” for new riders to cycle within the CBD, said the owner of biking specialist shop Bike Labz.

Indeed, given factors like that and the tropical weather, there are those who are sceptical that cycling to or around the business district would become popular.

The Bike Boutique formerly at Tras Street was founded in 2003 by Lynten Ong and a partner originally as a bike storage facility offering cyclists the use of showers. Mr Ong, who left the company in 2007 before it changed its business, said that in his time, demand was “quite minimal”.

“Cycling has grown a little bit more over the years. It’s more acceptable now … but if you notice, it’s more an expat market rather than a local market. It’s still in its infancy, I think it’ll take a while more before locals can accept the fact that it’s okay to cycle to work. Maybe when COEs go up to S$100,000 for cars,” quipped Mr Ong, who now owns a bike shop at Jalan Batu.
-CHEOW XIN YI

Republic Poly team from left to right: Rebecca, Kai Rui, Ben, Jia Rong

Over the last few, weeks before we sign up our first user, there were a group of young people riding the ISUDA bikes in the one-north area. No, the bikes were not stolen, the youth group is from Republic Poly. Kai Rui and his team from RP is helping to survey the area. They took up ISUDA Bike is their final year project of “Design for Business”. I am very impressed by the enthusiasm of this group. From the way it goes, we may even see ISUDA @ RP at some point next year!