Could Bixi's Financial Problems Affect Bike-Share in New York, D.C. and Beyond?

You could say that Montréal is the cradle of the bike-share movement as we know it today in North America. The Canadian city is the headquarters for PBSC Urban Solutions, a.k.a. Bixi, the company that manufactures the bikes and stations for one of the most prevalent bike-share systems now in use in cities across the continent and the world. PBSC’s bikes and stations are the backbone of some of the biggest and most high-profile systems out there – Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Boston, and Minneapolis, to name a few. The company also supplied the hardware for the London bike-share scheme.

Montréal’s own Bixi bike-share, the inaugural PBSC venture launched in 2009, was the largest system in North America until Citi Bike launched in New York this summer. (Technically, PBSC is the parent entity and Bixi refers to the bike-systems in Montréal and other cities where PBSC runs operations, although in practice the two names are often used interchangeably.) But according to a letter filed last month by Montréal’s auditor general, the company’s finances are in disarray – the latest chapter in a series of money woes that have plagued PBSC and Bixi, which was founded in 2007 by the City of Montréal's parking authority for the purpose of creating a bike-share system for Montréal and is still under the city's administration.