Posts about Capital Bikeshare

How Boston is promoting equity

Daisy De La Rosa, Project Director with the Boston Public Health Commission, explained that her commission was able to use a federal Communities Putting Prevention to Work grant (part of the Recovery's act funding) to subsidize 600 memberships for low income/minority residents around the Roxbury area of Boston.

While the percentage of minority users of Hubway is still very low (3% Latino, 5% Asian, 1% African American) and there is still lots to be done to increase ridership, they have been doing lots of outreach work and bike education around the low income areas that Hubway serves.

Credit card accessibility was not much of an issue to Hubway users, said De La Rosa, contrary to what we keep hearing about in DC, but aggressive marketing and outreach is important. Further, through existing partnerships with local CBO's, community leaders and word of mouth, they have been able to reach and sign up many new members qualifying for $5 yearly subsidized memberships.

Additionally, the Public Health Commission has met constantly with reps from Hubway to advocate for relocating a few stations closer to underserved minority and low income areas and closer to supermarkets, which could be a great solution to food deserts. Lastly, Ms. DelaRosa stressed on how important it is for bike sharing marketing campaigns to target their message differently for different communities and to continue to educate the public about the different transit options they have.

How Washington is promoting equity

Chris Eatough, BikeArlington Program Manager, talked about how the program continues to be at the forefront of innovative initiatives for reaching out to minority communities. And while minority/low income ridership remains low in this area, CaBi is reportedly doing a better job at reaching out to different communities.

For example, BikeArlington (CaBi's implementing office in Arlington) has been meeting with members of the Latino community about Arlington's Strategic plan and its call for phasing in Capital Bikeshare.

The Bank on DC program offers access to both a checking account and CaBi to people without bank accounts. CaBi's new payment installment program divides the yearly membership cost into 12 payments of $7—just $9 higher than the $75 you would pay through a one-time payment.

Finally, while stations might not reach every single neighborhood in our area, and geographic equity might not be completely feasible due to the financial implications it may represent, CaBi continues to be the most geographically diverse system in the US, said Eatough: CaBi stations in the District have been placed in each of the 8 Wards giving access to many more people.

To summarize, there are a few things that programs can continue to do: emphasize educating the community at large about biking in general; use targeted marketing strategies that center around low-income and minority populations, and create market initiatives such as subsidies and amortized payments.

Finally, programs could even take away the security deposit requirements, just as Minneapolis' Nice Ride just did, which would remove the extra hold CaBi places on an account, tying up funds. By creating targeted opportunities campaigns, programs can continue to enhance the brand and make bikeshare available to a broader spectrum of the community.

My recently completed master's paper analyzes the factors behind the number of trips at different Capital Bikeshare stations. I created a regression of trips in October 2011 that began at stations in the District. After controlling for 14 variables, the analysis concludes that 5 key factors primarily determine a station's usage:

• The population aged 20-39
• The level of non-white population
• The retail density, using alcohol licenses as a proxy
• Whether Metrorail stations are nearby
• The distance from the center of the CaBi system

I measured each variable based on what's within a ¼-mile walk of each station. With that information, I created a "suitability map," above. For any spot in DC, it projects how much ridership a station would get if DC placed one there. You can also download the KML file to view the analysis in Google Earth.

The map shows that as you get farther from the main activity centers in central DC, there's a dramatic drop-off in station demand. Approximately 13% of Capital Bikeshare stations, as of March 2012, are located in areas where we would expect fewer than 18 trips a day. The actual usage data shows that a significant number of these stations at the edge of the system have even fewer trips.

There are equity reasons to place stations outside the core; policymakers want to make sure that money spent on Capital Bikeshare benefits more than just those who live and work in central areas, and it builds political support from councilmembers representing wards farther away. However, there are multiple areas around the District that are under-served by bikeshare today, yet highly suitable under the analysis.

Planners and policymakers should consider these areas as they build out and tweak the system in the coming years. The figure below shows the coverage gaps by overlaying the existing bikeshare stations and the suitability map.

Suitability gaps in the Capital Bikeshare system.

What can we conclude from this? The Washington region and other cities should consider the following issues when they plan and expand their systems:

Distance from the center matters. This variable accounts for 60% of the variation among station usage, by far the most of any factor. This matches a principle known as the "gravity model" in transportation planning, which predicts more trips between closer locations. Capital Bikeshare's pricing structure also encourages shorter trips by charging for using a bike over 30 minutes, which strengthens this factor.

Carefully weigh goals of equity and coverage against ridership. It's very important to provide active, multi-modal transportation options to low-income and minority communities, and this study does not dispute that. That being said, it is important to carefully assess the tradeoffs among various objectives, especially in light of the relative costs of providing other mobility options for individuals of lower socioeconomic status.

Suburbanization of bikeshare has opportunities and pitfalls. The prospect of a region-wide bicycle sharing system in the nation's capital is an alluring one to advocates. It is easy to imagine a robust, polycentric system around dense nodes like Alexandria, Arlington, Bethesda, College Park, and Silver Spring.

However, some facts could temper that enthusiasm. Even some relatively close-in stations in the District have very low usage. Nearly 40 of the 97 stations in operation during October 2011 experienced 15 or fewer trips a day. Similarly, the densest parts of Arlington, with 18 stations during the same period, had 15% of stations system-wide but just 5% of trips.

To successfully expand bikeshare into the suburbs, planners need to choose station locations wisely, and elected officials need to invest enough to create a critical mass of stations early on. If we rush to build an inadequate suburban system, then it will likley not meet expectations and could act to blunt public support for the program, precluding a more economically sustainable system later on.

Stations can easily move as we learn more. Within a matter of hours, bikeshare operators can load stations on a truck and redistribute them to more suitable locations. While Capital Bikeshare operates year round, colder cities like Montreal and Boston take their stations away each winter. Planners there use the spring launch of the system to refine the location of their stations based on station performance the previous year. Capital Bikeshare should schedule an annual station redistribution.

Promote open bicycle sharing data. Having this data available to graduate students and anyone else promotes transparency, scholarship, and innovation. Bicycle sharing systems are proliferating rapidly, which is very encouraging, but few systems nationwide release trip data.

For instance, despite $4.5 million in grants from public sources ($3 million from the Federal Transit Administration), data from Boston's Hubway remains proprietary because of a private sponsorship agreement with New Balance. New York also hopes to fully fund its system with private dollars, which creates a danger that the same may happen there.

Like other North American cities, DC relied on international practices to plan its original system. Now, with an ample stream of data and more than $13 million in public funding committed to the regional system, it is time to strategically reassess station locations to ensure that bike sharing remains viable for the long term, as a true transportation investment.

Jantzen writes:

The bikes don't have GPS transmitters on them, so all we know is the data for the start and end of each trip. Thus, all dots are shown moving in straight lines. The speed of course doesn't correspond to the rider's actual speed, since we don't know their routes, or whether they paused for stops along the way. ...

The CaBi data includes whether the rider was a casual or registered user, depending on whether the rider's membership was for a month or longer. The movie shows casual users with dots that fade from green to yellow. Registered users are represented with dots that fade from blue to purple. A histogram on the right records the number of bikes in use at each moment.

The movie excludes the 210 trips that began and ended at the same station. 63% of these "round trips" were made by casual users. (Casual users made up 32% of the other trips.) You will still see some dots that appear to be stationary, but they are actually moving very slowly, representing people who go far, far beyond the 30-minute time limit for free trips.

Update: Jantzen realized that the original video used data from November 20, 2010, not 2011 as he originally planned. He has now updated the video and the new video is in this post. You can also still see the original video. The new video shows data for Saturday, November 19, 2011.

Just two weeks ago, NCPC approved NPS plans for 5 stations on the Mall, at Smithsonian Metro and near the Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and FDR/MLK memorials.

They said the goal was to get one station installed before the cherry blossom festival. Not only did the cherry blossoms come quickly this year thanks to the good weather, but so did the station.

As it turns out, NPS and Capital Bikeshare exceeded that promise: a 2nd station, at the Washington Monument, is also active today.

Twitter user whiteknuckled surmised, "I predict the new Mall bikeshare station will either have zero docks or zero bikes at almost all times for the next few weeks."

It will be very interesting to watch the CaBi dashboard and, once it's available, the trip data to see how this station affects usage. At the NCPC meeting, Harriet Tregoning predicted it will spark a large surge in daily memberships, which are fiscally very healthy for Capital Bikeshare.

In other exciting bicycle infrastructure news, WABA reports that DDOT is installing bike lanes on Columbia Road today.

Image from WABA.

25 trips around downtown DC

The analysis

I picked 25 random station pairs in downtown DC (1 mile radius around Metro Center, shown above) for this study. For each origin-destination pair, the Capital Bikeshare trip data gave me a large number of bicycle trip time measurements, but I needed to know how long the trip would take by other modes like car, transit or walking.

Since no data sets exist for those modes, I used Google Maps' time estimates as a proxy. A comparison of Google's bike trip time predictions with real data from Capital Bikeshare riders returned a strong correlation (r = 0.93), confirming that Google's estimates are probably a sufficiently accurate replacement.

For Capital Bikeshare trip data, I started with the data set cleaned up by Corey Holman. The data set contains over 1.3 million trips over a period of about 14 months.

But one major issue remained. I needed to make sure the data measured the direct trip time between a pair of stations. While most Capital Bikeshare trips are frequent riders going directly from one station to another, some trips are tourists taking a long leisure ride that just happens to start and end at these stations. Since I was only interested in direct trips, I only considered trips taken by registered users.

The graph below illustrates a sample station pair. You can see that registered users (in red) have a very different pattern of trip times than casual users (in purple). Registered users take trips of slightly different durations depending on their speed and exact route, but they seem to be going fairly directly from point to point, as their trip times follow a normal distribution with a long right tail. Casual users' trip durations are wildly different and don't follow as clear a pattern.

Histogram showing the distribution of all trip times from 19th & Constitution to 19th & L.

In the diagram above, the black tire track shows driving time while the green line shows bike time from Google. The stacked bars show Capital Bikeshare trip times for registered (red) and casual (purple) users. The peaked distribution between 6-12 minutes reflects direct trips, and the longer trips reflect leisure rides. The pink dot shows the trip time of the fastest 10% rider; the red dot shows the median rider.

The results

The final results are shown in the figure below. The fastest 10% of riders, traveling at 10 miles per hour, were faster than a car trip with parking time added in every trip studied—100%.

While an average rider on a bike, traveling nearly 8 miles per hour, will rarely beat a direct car trip without traffic or parking over the same distance, the fastest riders have a decent shot. When bike trips are compared to a direct car trip (like being chauffeured), the median rider was faster in 4% of trips studied. The fastest 10% of riders were still faster in 24% of trips. But in the real world, where cars have to find parking, bicyclists win big, whether they're fast riders or average ones.

Percentage of trips where biking is faster, depending on a Bikeshare user's speed. The graph on the left assumes direct car trips, the graph on the right assumes 5 minutes of parking time.

To be sure, these comparisons are not perfect. Both driving and cycling times have caveats.

For driving times, Google Maps no longer considers traffic delays in their trip time calculations, but rush hour gridlock in downtown DC will add huge delays to car trips, when bikes can zip through. In the bike trip data, I could help compensate for daily variation in weather and traffic by randomly selecting only one of several trips per day between a pair of stations, but this was not possible for driving times.

Second, even assuming 5 minutes of parking time is charitable to drivers. Donald Shoup reports (PDF) an average of 8 minutes of time spent cruising for parking, in multiple studies from multiple cities. That doesn't even include the time spent paying a meter or getting out of a garage.

These travel times only count trips from one Capital Bikeshare station to another station, not the walking times to and from Capital Bikeshare stations. Therefore, they most closely reflect the times for people bicycling on their own bikes. Trips using Capital Bikeshare take a few extra minutes. While some people are lucky enough to be located very close to a CaBi station, most of us have to walk a couple of minutes to the nearest station.

A more sophisticated study could use arbitrary trips on the downtown grid to estimate the extra walking time for Capital Bikeshare trips, and better estimate the time Washington drivers actually spend in traffic and parking.

Despite these caveats, my results are not anomalous. A related study in Lyon, France, agrees that shared bikes were faster than cars in the central city.

That study used precise trip distance information from a "counter on the bike," which unfortunately isn't possible with Capital Bikeshare. They also inferred that bicyclists were taking unapproved shortcuts through the city center, but our data shows that even in downtown DC, with few shortcuts, shared bikes are still highly efficient.

I would have liked to study every single pair of Capital Bikeshare stations, but was limited by the tedious task of getting trip times from Google Transit. Since I was primarily interested in testing the effectiveness of bicycling around the city's downtown core, where it has the best potential to overcome traffic, that was where I focused.

It would not be surprising if bicycling were equally effective in other dense neighborhoods such as Dupont, Logan, Shaw, Adams Morgan, or Capitol Hill, but I have not tested this. Some trips, like Anacostia to Arlington, may not be very efficient by bicycling because routes are lacking, though bikes often perform well in commuter competitions like last year's in Reston.

If you're interested in another set of trips or cluster of stations, we could set up a collaborative spreadsheet with instructions for collecting the numbers needed. Let me know in comments below, or send me an email. And if you're interested in working with Capital Bikeshare data or software, please join us at the new developer forum.

Small business: As in many forums, most candidates gave few specifics, and in most cases didn't sharply disagree with one another. For example, I asked all candidates to talk about a time they'd helped a local business directly. I asked this first of Vincent Orange, who often touts his work bringing Home Depot to the Rhode Island Avenue Metro area but when talking about small business, speaks much more in generalities.

Orange and the other candidates launched into generic, prepared statements about the value of small business. Sekou Biddle's answer, that he helps them most of all by patronizing them, was the most responsive. Orange was, however, able to name a lot of local businesses once pressed.

Affordable housing: Peter Shapiro had thoughtful recommendations for how to promote housing affordability, drawing on his experience with Arts District Hyattsville when he served in Prince George's County. Perhaps because of his experience as an elected official in the past, Shapiro gave more specifics about actions he has taken or policies he would implement on this and some other issues.

All candidates raised their hands when asked if they would restore the Housing Production Trust Fund; hopefully Orange, in this budget cycle, and whoever wins the race, in the future, follows through on that promise.

Ethics: Shapiro went the furthest on campaign finance reform, criticizing the current council for not taking stronger steps and arguing it should pursue a public financing system for elections. Biddle called for reforms to money order contributions, the source of the latest scandal.

Orange, as he has in the past, emphasized his advocacy for banning outside employment for councilmembers, but hasn't agreed to support limits on corporate contributions. He defended his decision not to cosponsor Mary Cheh's recent campaign finance bill as "self-serving," since Cheh holds other jobs as a law professor at GW and teaching bar review courses. (Tommy Wells, the one co-sponsor, does not have any outside employment).

Transportation: During a section on transportation, it came out that of the candidates, only Sekou Biddle is a member of Capital Bikeshare, and only he and Peter Shapiro subscribe to Zipcar. Biddle even pulled out his CaBi key, on his keychain, and his Zipcar membership card right on the stage.

I asked candidates about how we could help cyclists and drivers better understand each other's needs and concerns. Without being "gotcha" about it, I wanted to give Vincent Orange a chance to speak to what he had learned from the January 1st episode where he parked in the 15th Street bike lane, was called out on Twitter, and apologized. Orange said that he hadn't realized on which side of the white stanchions he should park, and that now he does.

Biddle proposed having driver education include information on how to deal with bicycle infrastructure and people riding bikes. This would only be a small start, since many DC drivers move in from other states, but it was a thoughtful response on the topic.

Biddle was also most able to talk about the role of buses in helping connect communities. I asked candidates to name a bus line that they feel works well in DC, partly to see how many could name a bus line at all. Orange gave an example of a bus line, the X2, but couldn't name it without help from a staffer who shouted it out unprompted.

Holness, marriage, and the Redskins: Dr. E. Gail Anderson Holness, generally considered a long-shot candidate, gave some reasons to appreciate her candidacy, but also some reasons for concern. As a resident of Ward 1, she lives in the most urban neighborhood among the candidates, and says she rides a bicycle and takes many forms of transit regularly. She was able to name many bus lines and talk about them in depth.

However, Holness was the only candidate of the four not to encourage Maryland residents to vote to keep the new same-sex marriage law. She also said on last week's WPFW debate that she supports giving land to the Redskins for a practice facility, on the theory that the master plan calls for recreational space.

The plan does ask for recreation space, but intended to serve local residents, not to be a fenced-off facility that only serves a professional team. I pushed on this issue, asking her why she would fulfill a neighborhood request in this way. She didn't have a good answer and seemed confused by the policy details.

The other candidates all reaffirmed their opposition to the practice facility. Orange said he would support bringing the actual team back and potentially using public funds, if it were part of a plan to create a "livable, walkable" community around the stadium as the District is doing at the ballpark.

"Livable, walkable" actually is a phrase Orange spoke at least 5 times over the course of the debate. It's a testament to the phrase Tommy Wells coined for his campaign slogan, and the policies behind it, that Orange has latched on. Hopefully this means he genuinely supports the principles of "livable, walkable" communities; either way, he clearly believes it's a growing political force.

Kwame's revenge: Speaking of Mr. "Livable, Walkable" Wells, the forum's most dramatic moment came near the end, when Orange suggested that Wells should have at least toned down his criticism of Kwame Brown's Lincoln Navigator scandal, to avoid losing his committee and his opportunity to advance his agenda. Shapiro quickly disagreed, arguing that Wells was right to speak up and that it shows the "dysfunction" in the current council that others did not come to his defense.

Did the forum help you make up your mind? What stuck out as most meaningful to you?