Canada's most European city is emulating the cultured continent yet again. On May 1, Montreal will officially unveil one of North America's first public bike sharing programs. Cleverly titled BIXI (a combination of bicycle and taxi), the new service will make 3,000 bicycles publicly available at 300 stations throughout Montreal. Who says public transportation has to be limited to the STM?

Similar systems are already quite popular and successful in bike-friendly European cities like Barcelona and Paris (Montreal apes Paris yet again), while smaller-scale bike sharing programs have appeared in Toronto and Washington, D.C. Monteal's BIXI, however, will be the biggest bike sharing scheme in North America to date.

The system is extremely simple. Go to a station and pick up a bike, ride it around, and drop it off at another station; it doesn't even have to be the one you took it from. BIXI cost $15 million to implement, but they are expecting to fully recover the cost through membership fees. You have to be a member to use BIXI, but once you've got the membership you get the first half hour of any trip for free. The price will increase incrementally after that for each half hour used.

It's usually much cheaper than driving or taking a taxi (the regular kind), and often even cheaper than using the Metro. If everywhere you go can be reached within 30 minutes, you don't ever have to pay a dime. Although BIXI doesn’t launch until May, users can pre-buy memberships until then, guaranteeing the first two months of membership for free.

Stations will be located mostly in the boroughs of Rosemont–La Petite-Patrie, le Plateau Mont-Royal and Ville-Marie as well as areas of Outremont and the Sud-Ouest, but new locations are already being scouted. Overall, this is a big deal for Montreal's prolific biking community, and with cities all over North America joining the "green revolution", you can expect BIXI won't be the last of its kind.