Normally the bicycles that are hired out by Melbourne Bike Share are coloured blue.
On August 8th I spotted a yellow bike – supposedly it was a one-off painted in celebration of Cadel’s victory in the Tour de France:
Last week on August 21st I found another non-standard bicycles – this time coloured green:
I wonder how many more one-off colours the Melbourne Bike Share bicycles appear in?
Postscript
The coloured bikes score a mention on the Facebook page for Melbourne Bike Share, as this post from July 2012 illustrates:
Looking for our coloured bikes? Here’s where they are
Yellow – Docked in station ACCA (Australian Centre of Contemporary Art)
White – Docked in station Sandridge Bridge Southbank
Polka Dot – Docked in station Docklands @ NAB – Harbour Esplanade / Bourke St.
Green – having a checkup, back on the streets shortly
Someone also managed to photograph all four of them in one place! Presumably to achieve this they went around Melbourne and hired each one, riding them back to a central location. As for me, it is a case of two down, two to go!
Bicycle number three
Only a day after I published this entry I found bicycle number three – Polka Dot:
How long until I find the last one?
September 2012: Bicycle number four
Two weeks after my last fine, we have the last one – plain white.
I saw the polka dot bike last week in the rack outside St Pauls. I am surprised that the bikes have a home dock. I take that to mean they are always taken back to their home dock by whoever moves the bikes around in their truck. Pretty unlikely that all four coloured bikes would end up in the same rack without some intervention.
I’ve got a feeling that the bikes doesn’t have a ‘home’ dock, with the Facebook post I linked to only listing the current location of each coloured bike on the day they wrote it.
I’ve got a feeling that the transfer of bikes between stations is to keep an even supply around the system – one story I heard is that stations at the top of hills run out of bikes, because people are happy to take them downhill, but too lazy to ride them back up!
Yes, for sure. Someone rotates the bikes so that racks don’t end up empty or overfull. I have seen the truck doing it. Downhill makes sense. I would do that. Get the tram uphill, and a bike downhill.