I finally got to see Montreal’s Bixi bike rental system up close. I was on the south shore of Montreal for a wedding and on the way home I ducked into Montreal, via car, for a bagel run and a short sightseeing tour for my son. The first thing that struck me was how prominent the system was. We were only in Montreal for less than an hour yet it seemed like every corner we turned there was a Bixi rack. Two people with me that knew nothing of Bixi asked about how you pay for it and theft. They thought it was cool and something that they would consider using. To answer the theft question, the bikes have parts that require special tools to take off. Does not make it impossible from my inspection but very time consuming if you do not have the right tools. You put a $250. deposit on the bike, not sure if that is your only cost if it gets stolen while under your care. Could be a kind of cheap souvenir from Montreal. You do need your own lock if you travel away from the Bixi system. Did not see any Bixi racks outside of the downtown area. The bikes themselves were very well maintained.
The Bixi thing is a little out of control though. What the fuck were the Bixi folks thinking when they decided to take out almost four prime parking spots on St-Viateur east of Parc for a rack? This stretch has the most heavily used short term parking in the entire City. It was really bad before Bixi, horrible now. Imagine you took out one parking spot on Queen West for a bike rental rack. Imagine the shit storm that would follow. Take out four and the ‘War on Cars’ would pale in comparison. All you can do though is imagine, no one has balls in Toronto to do something like that. They would sooner pave over a playground to make way for the racks.
Short funny story about my trip. I was getting all sorts of directions on how to get to people’s homes to photograph them for the wedding. They kept telling me to go to streets named “rang” so and so. I knew that “rang” in French meant monkey. I was in St-Jean du Richilieu, maybe it was to honour the monkeys in the Granby Zoo a few cities over. Finally I piped up. “Why the hell do you people name all of you streets after monkeys, it is pretty silly?” I got a polite smile, “rang” means rural route. A “singe” is a monkey, I guess in my old recollection they sounded the same. I guess that is why whenever I tried to speak French to anyone they responded to me in English. I did not bother to ask why they had no less than four street name signs for one street that I passed earlier in the day.
