The Future of Bike Sharing Schemes in the United States

[marmar]

from the Next American City:




The Future of Bike Sharing Schemes in the United States
Theodore Brown | Jun 24th, 2011




Boston is a small city; you can walk from one official end to the other in under an hour at a brisk pace. Being small has its advantages. Most Bostonians can walk to work when the weather is nice when they have the will and public transportation tends to serve areas of dense employment pretty thoroughly. Lacking megalopolis status also means that Boston has a relative affinity for its bicycle-bound commuters and late this past April, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino made the push for bicycles to become a permanent part of Boston’s infrastructure landscape by initiating a bike-sharing program.

Bike sharing is a fledgling concept in the United States and has the tendency to be scattershot geographically. Chicago, Minneapolis, and Des Moines have programs in the Midwest while shares in Miami, Boston, and Washington, D.C. dot the coastlines. Two cities known for their high share of cycling commuters and typically progressive agendas, New York and San Francisco, are exploring their options. The most robust of these programs, Capital Bikeshare in Washington, has about 1,100 bikes and 114 stations distributed throughout the metro area, about one-fifth the size of Montreal’s Bixi (the largest in North America) and one-twentieth the size of Paris’ Vélib´.

The relative size of the American bike programs to their international counterparts has more to do with the lack of political and economic will to invest in a program that is seen as both detrimental to the car industry —still one of the most powerful lobbies in the US even post-bailout— and impractical due to the still burgeoning suburbs. America is, ostensibly, an urbanized country (82%) which should provide a population that would make wide use of bike shares, but the statistics are misleading as the geographic idiosyncrasies of American metro areas lead to demographics much more likely to use their cars than their bikes. Sunny and sprawling Phoenix, Arizona spans more than 500 square miles and every resident that resides within that plane is counted as an “urban” dweller.

That being said, bike sharing has been gaining momentum in major metropolitan areas in recent years and months, best exhibited by the Capital Bikeshare (C.B.). While there are cities with higher percentages of cycling commuters —Boulder, Colorado, an idyllic college town has one of the only double-digit modal share among U.S. metro areas— Washington, D.C.’s program is a model for other densely populated cities. Sam Kelly, a Peace Corps volunteer on his way to Namibia in August, took his first ride on C.B. Two weeks ago. “The two stations near to me were pleasant surprises,” he said in an interview last week, “and as I got towards the city center I started seeing more of them. The system seems like it’s working great.” ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://americancity.org/buzz/entry/3039/

[taterguy]

1. Socialist and anti-car. Could you be more un-American?

I bet the people who use that service prefer soccer to baseball.

[marmar]

2. :)

:P

[a la izquierda]

14. Muahahaha...

you've got me pegged perfectly.

[liberal N proud]

3. The corporatist will only allow this to last if there is big profit or

it stays small scale.

[taterguy]

4. They have corporations in Europe. What makes us so different?

I'm not being snarky. I'd like to have a dialogue on this subject.

[liberal N proud]

7. Europeans have always had mass transit

Trains are all over the place and the people grow up using them.

They are also not afraid of a little exercises, we are lazy and the oil companies keep us addicted to the liquid gold.

[taterguy]

9. So what keeps us off bikes? Laziness, fear, not living in places with bikeable destinations?

And more importantly, what can we do to change those things?

Do American corporations have so much power that we can't change? Or are they just like the Wizard of Oz, and all we have to do is recognize the power that we do have over our own lives?

Of course one factor is that with our relatively cheap gas, a lot of times using a car is the most rational behavior. If I drive to work it takes me 10 minutes vs. 20 biking. It costs 25 cents in gas. Is 10 minutes of my time worth a quarter? Depends on what mood I'm in.

[liberal N proud]

11. All of the above

Plus, the United States is so spread out, the cities in Europe are tight with a few exceptions.

It is 20 miles from my house to downtown Cleveland through some pretty rough neighborhoods and no good route for bicycles.

America was built for the automobile where Europe still retains much of the system they have used for decades to get around. Europe was always a collection of small communities and in many ways still is.

Do American corporations have so much power that we can't change? - That remains to be seen, I think. It all depends on us. Are we going to let them control everything, or turn it around?

Can't answer that.

[taterguy]

12. Vast sections of America were developed before automobiles but somehow cars achieved hegemony

I live in a neighborhood built before World War II. There's almost nothing I really and truly need that's more than 4 miles away.

How do most people in my neighborhood get around? In cars.

It's a baffling puzzle.

I ponder it every weekend when I'm driving to COSTCO.

[KittyWampus]

5. Love it! And you know NYC has pianos around the town. One at Coney Island.

Yes there is!

[myrna minx]

6. It's wildly popular in the Peoples Republic of Minneapolis. K&R

On edit - We also have car shares - where you can rent a Prius by the hour for larger purchases etc.

http://www.hourcar.org/

[Yavin4]

8. Do You Sing This Song While Pedaling?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yDrtNEr_5M


:sarcasm:

[hfojvt]

10. but what about big hills?

One speaker at a retreat mentioned his experience with "white bikes". Which were the bike-shared bikes. The trouble, he said, was that the campus (where the program took place) had a huge hill, and so all the white bikes ended up at the bottom of the hill. Duh, even I am not gonna push a bike up a huge hill and goto a class or the University bookstore, only to come outside and find that 'my' bike has been taken back down the hill by some freeloader, who didn't do all the work of bringing the bike up the hill. Knowing how that is likely to work, I am just gonna walk up the darn hill. The trouble with a shared bike, versus my own bike, is that you may end up walking home. And also, who is gonna change the tires.

Given a budget for maintenance, and the likelihood that people are not gonna take as good care of things that they don't own, I don't see how this is easier than people just putting up $200 to buy a bike and a lock. Aren't these shared bikes gonna spend a fair amount of time sitting out in the rain?

[taterguy]

13. The fact that these programs won't work everywhere doesn't mean they won't work anywhere

There are plenty of large metropolitan areas where they would be worthwhile.

YMMV.

Obviously.