The many ways of running a bike-share system

At CNU-20 in West Palm Beach, roughly 350 attendees took to two wheels, thanks to a bike-share demonstration program organized by DecoBike LLC.

“Normally there’s no such thing as a traveling bike-share program,” says Colby Reese, chief marketing officer for DecoBike. But for CNU-20, the Miami Beach-based company, in cooperation from the West Palm Beach Downtown Development Authority, decided to place three bike-share docking stations in the downtown from May 9 to May 12. CNU participants signed up for passes entitling them to ride free for up to four hours at a stretch.

The four-day bike program was the latest example of the introduction of bike-share programs across the country. Bike-sharing is expected to arrive in the nation’s largest city in late July. The New York City Department of Transportation has proposed the first 420 locations of Citi Bike, a program that will be operated by a subsidiary of Alta Bicycle Share. The DOT and Alta—which currently runs bike-share systems in Boston and Washington—expect to have 600 docking stations in operation within months.

By summer 2013, New York is envisioning a fleet of 10,000 bikes—the largest such program in the US. Cyclists will pay $95 a year for access to the bikes. The first 45 minutes of each ride will be free.

A hit in Florida

DecoBike’s demonstration program in West Palm Beach “was a smash hit,” says Raphael Clemente, executive director of the Downtown Development Authority (DDA). Clemente would like to have a permanent program, with more docking locations, operating in West Palm Beach next year.

“More than 200 cities around the world have bike-share programs,” the New York musician and bike enthusiast David Byrne wrote in an opinion piece in the May 27 New York Times. “This simple form of transportation,” Byrne predicted, “is about to make our city more livable, more humane and better connected.”

Most bike-share programs in the US have gotten started with government help. Alta’s Washington program, currently the nation’s largest, owes its inception partly to a $6 million grant from the US Department of Transportation.

DecoBike is unusual, Reese says, in that it began in Miami Beach in March 2011 with money that was privately raised—about $4 million. By May of this year, DecoBike’s more than 100 stations in Miami Beach had accommodated over 900,000 trips. About 4 percent of the city’s residents have purchased memberships. Payment of $15 a month entitles a member to an unlimited number of rides, says Reese. 

By shifting an estimated 2.5 million miles of travel from motor vehicles to single-speed bikes, more than 2.4 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions have been eliminated, DecoBike estimates. Deco also operates in Surfside, Florida (a small community north of Miami Beach), and launched a bike-share program in late May in Long Beach in Nassau County, New York.

Some of the CNU attendees were surprised that walk-up customers in West Palm Beach who didn’t have a membership or a pass were charged such hefty prices—$4 for the first 30 minutes, $5 for the first hour, $10 for two hours, and $18 for four hours. But Reese points out that bike-share programs offer a number of pricing options, based on whether the rider has a membership and on how long the rider will use the bike. In Miami Beach, he says, the best-selling rental is 30 minutes, and a one-hour rental can be had for $5. “People use it instead of getting a cab,” he says.

Criteria for success

Ultimately, the success of bike-sharing will depend partly on the size and scope of the program in each locality. “There’s a difference between an occasional trip and being able to rely on it for transportation,” Reese says. In his view, one important factor is density of coverage. He says DecoBike has one bike for every 88 Miami Beach residents, while the Washington program has approximately one bike per 500 residents, and Denver’s program has about one per 1,200.

“In New York, where 54 percent of all trips are less than two miles,” the organizers of Citi Bike say, “bike share will be useful to almost everyone—New Yorkers trying to get across town, commuters traveling to or from neighborhoods with fewer subway stations, students getting from dorms to classrooms, people who live a long walk from subway or ferry stations, and tourists moving between the city’s vast array of attractions.”

For eight months, NYC DOT conducted a public input process on the bike-share program, meeting with 14 community boards and conducting more than 200 sessions with business improvement districts, property owners, civic associations, institutions, and elected officials. The City received nearly 10,000 suggestions and 65,000 votes for docking station sites on an interactive map. Those consultations should help the system to reflect public preferences in various sections of the city.

New York’s program is sponsored by sponsorship agreements and revenue from users—not taxpayer funds. If the system makes money, as the City expects, the profit will be split between the City and the Alta subsidiary, NYC Bike Share.

Because West Palm Beach has a low population density, introduction of a permanent program in West Palm would probably require a subsidy. “It’s not out of the question for us to provide some money to get the program up and running,” says Clemente, noting that for more than a decade, the DDA has supported another downtown transportation option—a “trolley” (a rubber-tired vehicle that last year provided more than 700,000 rides, all free).

Bike-sharing in the US seems to have avoided the vandalism problems that have troubled some European programs, especially a large bike-share operation in Paris.

In New York, there has been some concern about whether the bike docking stations will take too much sidewalk space away for pedestrians and  about whether bikes stored on the streets will make it harder for motorists to find on-street parking for their cars. According to a May 12 New York Times article, the city’s DOT says many locations selected for on-street bike stands were previously marked “no standing” or “no parking,” so the impact on motor vehicle parking should be minimal.