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Bike share: Coming to Seattle, delayed in San Francisco, doubted in New York — someday in Vancouver?

April 6th, 2014 · 30 Comments

It really takes a full-time national reporter to stay on top of the bike-share thing, with all the various news events. Among them in the past month:

– Montreal got four offers for the international arm of Bixi recently, but decided none were good enough.

– The City of Montreal will provide enough money ($4.3 mil) to keep Bixi bike-share going on its own city for one more year.

– Toronto is stepping up to keep bike-share going there, with a new name and Alta Bicycle Share (the company Vancouver is working with) managing the system.

– Seattle, which is also planning to incorporate a helmet-dispensing system, JUST LIKE US, and has been working with Alta Bicycle Share, JUST LIKE US,  is saying they’re hoping to be functional by summer.

– Negative stories recently out of New York and worries about poor operations of the system there. (Alta Bicycle Share)

– Continued delays of the system expansion in San Francisco/Bay Area

– A response from Alta

– And my story recently in Urban Land magazine, which took a look at the big picture. (Will the troubles of Bixi kill bike share? Umm, no. But there are some big issues to figure out.)

– By the way, we’re still waiting for news here in Vancouver.

 

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  • John Geddes

    The longer we wait the better. It seems pretty clear from your various articles that there is little up-side in being an early adopter of these systems and many downsides.

    I’ve seen and used the bikes in other cities and I just don’t see the long term sustainability for bike commuting. Heavy clunky bikes, marginally maintained. Not what I would want for my bike commute, but very handy for tourists.

    But as Alta says time will tell and my feelings re the bikes could turn out to be in the minority. But unless someone like Citi with deep pockets is willing to finance the Vancouver experiment, we might be well advised to wait and see — this seems to be the approach of the COV at the moment.

  • L Leeman

    Horse share is so much better. Why mess with Bixi when 4 mil a year could get you a lot of horses out there?

  • rph

    A year or two more of wait and see (especially for the Seattle model) is a good thing for Vancouver. Hopefully wiser heads will prevail.

  • Everyman

    So the summary is: it doesn’t work unless subsidized, either by the taxpayer or a sponsor?

  • Agustin

    @ Everyman: just like any other mode of transportation 🙂

    IMHO, it’s not terrible for Vancouver to take its time getting to Bike Share. The helmet thing will be challenging enough; better to learn from the experiences of other cities and get it right from the get-go.

  • boohoo

    Waiting is better, the helmet issue is still the giant elephant in the room. Don’t know how any system works with that law in place.

    @5–No doubt, seems we forget that.

  • canadianveggie

    As painful as it would be to have bike share delayed yet again (Hamilton will now launch before Vancouver), I think it would be prudent to watch how Seattle’s helmet dispenser succeeds/fails before launching here. No city in the world has successfully integrated bike share with helmets or a mandatory helmet law. Boston’s Hubway has been experimenting with a helmet dispenser, but only at 4 stations (at a cost of $10,000 per helmet vending machine).

    If the costs here are similar, that’s $1.25 million of the capital costs going to the helmet vending machines, not to mention the ongoing operating costs of collecting helmets, cleaning them, and replacing damaged ones. That’s a lot of money to work around a law that few places in the world have found necessary.

    And for those interested in the net health benefits of bike sharing (without helmets), check out the comprehensive study of bike share in London by BMJ: http://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.g425
    Particularly interesting is this paragraph:
    “When the London cycle hire scheme was launched, concern was expressed in the press and in the consultation process that cycle hire users would face higher injury rates. Like one previous Canadian study, our findings are reassuring in finding no evidence that cycling on a bicycle sharing system is more dangerous than own bicycle cycling. Indeed, if anything our results suggest that using cycle hire bicycles may be safer than cycling in general in central London, although to date the comparisons are underpowered. Why this may be true merits further research. Helmets are not provided with the cycle hire bicycles and have been reported in London and elsewhere to be used less often by cycle hire users. More plausible explanations could include characteristics of the bicycles (slower and with built-in lights), patterns of cycling (for example, a higher proportion of cycling in parks), or the behaviour of drivers (potentially driving with greater care around cycle hire users).”

  • Bill

    Speaking of London which does not have a mandatory helmet law:

    “Something is going badly wrong with London’s bike-share scheme. Launched in summer 2010 to great enthusiasm, London’s 4,000 “Boris Bikes” (so called after Mayor Boris Johnson) were supposed to usher a new age of car-free, cycle friendly streets to the city. This year, however, their popularity has fallen by almost a third. While the system recorded 726,893 journeys in November 2012, last month there were only 514,146. To cap these poor user figures, today Transport for London announced that the scheme’s major sponsor, Barclays Bank, will pull out of its sponsorship deal in 2015. Given the bad publicity the system has received recently, it may be hard to find a replacement sponsor without some major changes.”

    Maybe bike share is just a bad idea.

  • Doug Dosdall

    I’ve used bike share programs in many cities and feel they are an enormous benefit to the cities who have them. As a tourist I’m more apt to visit and stay longer. Environmental benefits are obvious. And the addition of so many additional cyclists really helps out cyclists on their own bikes too as more bikes mean drivers are more used to them and the city feels safer for bikes.

    But they need to be thought of as part of the transportation system. The New York experience is illustrative. The system is a phenomenal success by all measures but one: the defecit it is operating at. But it was designed to work with zero public money. How well would our transit systems work with zero public money. How about our roads? So yes, a subsidy needs to be part of the picture but if looked at in terms of its share of the transportation system I bet it is the cheapest use of tax dollars per person or per km traveled than anything else.

    Helmets though may in fact make Vancouver’s system untenable. If the provincial government will not provide a waiver despite all the evidence of the net positive effects of getting rid of helmet laws then the mayor should direct the police chief to not enforce the rule for bike share riders (or make it lowest possible policing priority if the former is not within his power).

  • Silly Season

    The helmet laws are an absolute red herring when it comes to the poor performance of the bike shares in North America.

    As anyone who has interest in transportation knows, the wheels have been coming off the program in NYC basically since the inception—even with 100% corporate sponsorship. Other cities as descibed above are also on the bubble.

    In New York, the program is very popular, but the locals are using it far more than the tourists, for whom it was originally intended. In Vancouver, as I understand it, the tourist is also supposed to be numero uno. Yet look at the areas to be serviced as per the CoV website—residential, mostly on the West Side of town. How…odd.

    Other problems that were exposed last spring and into the summer by the NY Times (and others): Software beyond glitchy, costs of repairs. And the most ironic thing of all: having the ability to get bikes to where people really want to pick up and drop off. They are actually transporting them around the city …via flat bed truck!

    Vancouver was going to roll this out before the next election. The timing would have been a disaster, given the multitude of problems in other cities. Now, they are dead quiet over there on the third floor.

    Until we figure out who the bikes are really meant for, how they will operate, how much subsidy—and they will need to be subsidized (and at $1.5 million dollars in the budget, that will be considered either too much —or way too little based on experiences thus far), the City needs to sit on our collective wallet. Operating costs are always the killer in transporation costs. Bike share will be no different. The bikes and stations themselves really off no value, financially. They depreciate immediately and are costly to repair.

    In fact, should you care to look at the bike share staff reports at City of Vancouver you will find they are rather lean in pointing out the downsides of the program. No surprise there. But the inability to show some caution is absolutely astonishing. These are ‘Documents For Dummies’ and not fit for public consumption or discussion.

    Additionally , you have a proponent (Alta) that has been in business for a relatively short time—yet has been given enormous credence by staffers and politicians in these cities—as well as some incredible subsidy deal,s on the taxpayer dime. And when that happens, it seems that it’s always underfunded, at that. These are not insignificant costs we are talking about.

    My question: why Alta? Either people who make these decisions on who to choose are a) starry-eyed B) not competent or c) have been pressured into using this company. Or, a combination of all three?

    With an unproven track record and chickens coming home to roost all over the place, way more analytical thinking—versus purely political reptilian brain thinking—should be used before this program is considered for launch.

    Bikes are great and are an important part of the transportation network—but seriously, local people—do yourselves, and all of us, a favour, for now—and buy your own bike for a couple of hundred bucks.

  • brilliant

    @Bill 8-I guess the novelty wears off, even in London. Or maybe the really wet weather they’ve experienced lately put a damper on it. Doesn’t bode well for bikeshare in Raincity.

  • Jeff Leigh

    @Silly Season #10

    I think the helmet issue and experience gained to date on the impacts of helmet laws relates far more to the Australian experience (where they have a helmet law) than it does to North America.

    I don’t think the system is targeted at tourists. I am sure tourists can and will use it, but the target is residents IMO. The benefit is picking up at point A and dropping at point B. That is a transportation model, not a model for tourists cruising the seawall. The tourists are and will continue to be well served by established bicycle rental outlets.

    I would expect that the bikes will have to be moved around. If they didn’t, it would be like saying that all taxis must park where they dropped their last fare and just wait for another fare. No relocating. Doesn’t seem reasonable to me. And as with taxis, bikes will need to be moved to placed of high demand. Even buses deadhead to places like UBC to handle the demand. This has to be looked at as a component of the transportation network, not as a bike story, again IMO.

    I am sure the system will need to be subsidized. Just like roads, buses, etc. The question is whether it is cost effective, not whether there needs to be a subsidy.

    I have bikes that I won’t lock up downtown in some locations. While better bicycle parking would help, there are times I would use a bike share, despite having bikes at home. And I would pay an annual membership for the ability to do so.

  • Bill

    @Jeff Leigh #12

    “The question is whether it is cost effective, not whether there needs to be a subsidy.”

    How exactly would you measure cost effectiveness?

  • Bill

    @brilliant #11

    Perhaps but I think bike share is a classic case of someone coming up with a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. Or a product that few want to buy.

  • Jeff Leigh

    @Bill #13

    How about subsidy cost per trip compared to transit, combined with usage statistics? Perhaps confine the comparison to trips under 5 km or whatever is reasonable. Aim for memberships and/or usage fees to provide the same contribution % as transit fares.

    Open to other suggestions….

  • Silly Season

    @ jeff Leigh #12

    No one is disputing the popularity of bike share in NYC. Clearly there is a demand. And therein lies a delicious irony.

    The moving of bikes is problematic in this way: they are actuallly single vehicle occupancy modes of transportation, unlike buses or taxis. How many of them do you need to actually meet demand (including infrastructure like more bike parks)—and does that cost compare favourably to ‘mass’ transit?

    Does it make sense to create an operational nightmare when perhaps it would make more sense for locals to be given a cheque/rebate of $200 to buy their own bike?

    Just sayin’…

  • spartikus

    The #8 comment demonstrates the time-honoured tactic of cherry-picking a paragraph out of longer article, which if allowed to read in full wouldn’t support the commenter’s attempted point. For example, it continues…

    So why has London’s bike-share scheme gone awry?

    In order of gravity, the answers seem to be cost, danger, and patchy maintenance.

    And ends…

    London bike-share’s difficult adolescence shows how creating a system isn’t enough. If you want to change a city’s transit habits, you need an extensive, safe cycle network to encourage people to keep using it once the novelty has worn off.

    But, please read the whole thing.

  • Jeff Leigh

    @Silly Season #16

    However many bikes and bike parking spaces you need for bike share, it is an order of magnitude less than if we bought everyone their own bike. Likely cheaper too, even after paying for repositioning costs.

  • Richard

    Seems to be going fine in Boston.

    http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/04/06/for-hubway-optimism-abounds-fourth-season/WbfqHXsKNezCeLUCzL18cM/story.html

  • brilliant

    @Spartikus 17-that proves nothing, other than the Bike Lobby has an excuse for everything. Just accept the fact the vast majority of people choose to travel by other methods.

    I was in New York in early March. The only remarkable thing about the bike lanes in Hells Kitchen was the lack of bikes using them, and the large amount of pedestrians on them.

  • Silly Season

    @Jeff Leigh

    How many bikes do we need to make the bike share work? 5,000? 10,000? What are we going to use as a measure of the program’s success?

    What is the cost of the ‘rolling stock’, the infrastructure over say, ten years? As demand for more bikes grow, all the operational costs grow too.

    If you’re going to reposition at specific stations, how many stations do you need in order to give people easy access to the bikes (the NYC bike share has found that people don’t want to make significant walks or add another mode of transportaion—like transit—in order to pick up a bike). Again, you may need a station every few blocks, much like bus stops (perhaps that’s a logical place to put bike stations–you may even encourage a walk-ride-transit use, in that case).

    Are you having a walk-up ‘first come, first serve’ service—if so, and someone can’t consistently get a bike, how long before that person drops the program?

    You could possibly phase in a program for self-ownership (via property tax credit, to start with) or, give a credit for those who buy bikes—and you needn”t do that all at once, either. It would be wonderful to develop several different scenarios and model them on bike share, vs own share vs a hybrid system.

    It seems to me that self ownership of a bike, spread over the population in in a 3 -5 year period would provide greater convenience to another transportation mode, encourage more bike use and take the onus off the taxpayer for something which doesn’t sound very sustainable at this time. If the City wants to put up money for bike parking stations—for a nominal annual or casual fee for users, that might be a plan.

    Even 100,000 new bike owners at $200 a pop over 5-10 years might be cheaper than what we could end up with the bike share program. Vancouver has an annual subsidy of $1.5 million in their plan right now. I doubt that this would cover the program, given the experience in other cities. Look to Montreal and Toronto’s costs, as a start.

  • Silly Season

    PS Has the City worked with TransLink on the bike share issue?

    Lots of transit ridership pick-up/drop-off points data they could use…

    If they aren’t working with TransLink…clunk.

  • Jeff Leigh

    @Silly Season #21

    I don’t know how many bikes will be required. I understood it would be phased in, so it would change over time. That applies to the question about how many stations as well. I think the city is waiting for the Alta proposal to have a conversation about these details, but I could be wrong.

    I am just using myself as an example here. I own bikes. I don’t need the city to buy me one, or help me buy one. But I would pay to use a bike share system, despite my bicycle ownership, because of the one way nature of many trips downtown.

    I don’t think buying bikes for people is the solution.

    Yes it would cost money. So do roads, bridges, transit, and so on. We could take the 2% bicycle mode share (or whatever it is at the moment), or even the 10% mode share we have achieved in some specific neighbourhoods, and take that portion of the transportation budget for cycling. Spend a piece of that existing pool of funds on bike share. Spend the rest of it on infrastructure, bicycle parking, education, etc.

    I think we need a proposal from Alta or another operator, so that we can move this discussion ahead with some real figures, and less speculation.

  • Richard

    @Silly

    Onus on taxpayers? $2 per person per year in the City is not much of a burden.

    I’m worry more about the cost health care which is around 40% of the provincial budget.

    Bike share helps reduce this cost by increasing physical activity.

    As well, by decreasing the amount of driving, crashes and the associated health care costs decrease.

  • Chris Keam

    “In New York, the program is very popular, but the locals are using it far more than the tourists, for whom it was originally intended. In Vancouver, as I understand it, the tourist is also supposed to be numero uno.”

    This is inaccurate and untrue for both cities. Bike shares aren’t primarily for tourists and to suggest so indicates a paucity of background research.

    Please visit streetsblognyc for reams of information about New York’s bike share experience from as early as 2007 when the idea was first floated.

    It is a public transportation mode, and as such is open to most, including residents, local visitors to bike share equipped areas, and tourists from out of town.

    It is of course somewhat interesting that the opposition to bike share voiced by some was its potential impact of tourism-focused bike rental companies… and now we are criticizing it for insufficient uptake by the same demographic.

    This article which took ’10 seconds of Googling’ to quote the inimitable spartikus, offers an overview of many systems around the world, including a number of cities that this little-travelled small town rube would not consider ‘tourist’ destinations.

    http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/destinations/2013/10/01/best-cities-bike-sharing/2896227/

  • teririch

    @Richard:

    The 40% of the health budget is province wide – and not just attached to Vancouver proper.

    $2 per person is not much if you have that $2 to hand over. (low income, homeless, seniors etc)

    There are those that cannot afford it and will never use the system – because they cannot afford to.

    On that note, I would love to see the City start putting some money into fixing/repairing/replacing sidewalks in this city.

    Many are in huge disrepair.

  • Richard

    @teri

    The $2 is an average. Some pay more, some less. I suspect anyone who does not have a home probably is not paying much tax to anyone.

    The city does have a budget for sidewalk repair. It is several million in the current capital plan. People don’t know about it because no one freaks out and protests it.

    Probably more is needed. Now would be a great time to ask for more as the capital plan discussions are happening.

    If a sidewalk is in bad shape, call 311. Thanks.

  • Bill

    @spartikus #17

    My comment was not about all bicycle travel but only the value of the bike share system and how it is failing in London. The three issues that you cited from the article to explain the failure of bike share in London are cost, danger, and patchy maintenance.

    With respect to cost, the article notes:

    “But while Paris’s bike-share scheme actually makes money for the city, London’s 4,000 bikes cost local taxpayers an average of £1,400 per bike per year. As the Daily Mail points out, this would be enough to buy each of the scheme’s 38,000 registered users a £290 bike.”

    The article fails to disclose that the Paris system is based on a hidden subsidy where the sponsor, JCDecaux, was given a monopoly on all billboard signs in Paris and is not a fair comparison to London.

    As for the danger aspect, data provided in the earlier citation in #7 showed:
    ”
    In all cases the observed injury rates while using the cycle hire scheme were lower than those estimated for cycling in general, including no reported fatalities as of end April 2012”

    The same study also provided the interesting observation about the users of bike share:

    “As shown in table 4, survey data indicated that most cycle hire trips would otherwise have been made by public transport (midpoint estimate 47% based on modelled analysis combining casual and registered users) or active travel (31% walking, 7% cycling), with a much smaller proportion otherwise made by car, van, taxi, or motorcycle (6%) or not made at all”

    So to recap – the bike share system is costly, no more dangerous than owned bicycle transportation and is not getting people out of their cars.

    So what is the argument for bike share, other than it is a cornerstone of Greeness?

  • Mark A

    Bike share is a great piece of the transportation puzzle, and we will come to see it as a standard thing in the cores of medium and large cities in the future.

    As much as I’d like to see it here, I think it’s more important to do it right the first time than to move too quickly and not get things right. If it blows up, we may not get another shot at it for a long time.

    Much better to let Seattle go first and see how things go.

  • Bill Lee

    RE: Seattle’s plans

    Subject: Bike Share gearing up for Seattle streets this summer | Seattle Times
    Newspaper
    X-URL: http://seattletimes.com/text/2023296616.html

    Friday, April 4, 2014 – Page updated at 02:00 p.m.

    Bike Share gearing up for Seattle streets this summer
    By Mike Lindblom, Seattle Times transportation reporter

    After weathering a sponsorship drought and the bankruptcy of a bicycle vendor, the new Puget Sound Bike Share should be ready to hit the streets by late summer, its director says.

    The opening phase will cover Seattle Children’s hospital, the University of Washington, the University District, Eastlake, Capitol Hill, South Lake Union, downtown and the central waterfront with 500 bicycles at 50 roadside stations. Customers can subscribe online or use a credit card to rent the shared-use bicycles from a kiosk, similar to using the city’s parking pay stations.

    [ The Money ]

    Holly Houser , executive director, said Thursday new sponsors will soon be announced, and her nonprofit will meet its $4.4 million startup budget. Previously the group was awarded a $1 million grant from the U.S. government, $750,000 from the Washington State Department of Transportation and $500,000 from Seattle Children’s. Operations contractor Alta, based in Portland, is replacing a Montreal-based bicycle vendor that sank into debt .

    …. Stations can be as large as 60 feet by 6 feet, typically installed on a sidewalk, in a private or public plaza or in curbside no-parking zones, Houser said. Prices aren’t determined yet, but the Washington, D.C., system charges $7 a day, $25 per month or $75 a year.

    By the end of this week, the [ psbs-soulside.dotcloud.com/page/about ] Puget Sound Bike Share website will post service-area maps and invite the public to vote for preferred station sites.

    Mike Lindblom: 206-515-5631 or mlindblomATseattletimes.com. On Twitter
    mikelindblom

    ——— Seattle Met commented
    seattlemet.com/news-and-profiles/publicola/articles/puget-sound-bike-share-launches-next-year-february-2013
    Like the car-sharing service Car2Go, which The C is for Crank told you everything you want to know about last week (Josh was less cranky here), Puget Sound Bike Share will initially cater to wealthier, whiter neighborhoods, while areas like the Rainier Valley (areas that, incidentally, include light rail stations that would be natural homes for bike-sharing kiosks) are left out.

    Although phases two through four include areas as far-flung as Bellevue and Redmond, it’s unclear when, if ever, bikes will be available in the southern half of Seattle; Bike Share’s business plan includes a few spots along the Rainier Valley light rail line and a small patch of West Seattle as part of a “potential future phase” that could launch sometime after “Phase 4,” in 2018 or later