Posts about Bike Sharing

Very few people will keep a bike that long. The purpose of bike sharing is for short point to point trips, not long rentals. But a lot of folks initially placed the system into their mental box of "bike rentals," and evaluated it accordingly. That'll pass, if it hasn't already, once people actually get to try using it.

Last night, at a public meeting in Brooklyn Heights, a few residents argued against bikeshare stations on their streets. Bikeshare supporter Mike Epstein (who's also a personal friend) tweeted some of the objections from the meeting:

Has a single station in DC turned into a "place for people to hang out"? Not that I'm aware. But some people worried about that here, too.

A BID employee from Montague Street, in Brooklyn Heights, wanted to keep 5 parking spaces instead of add 39 bikeshare docks, while a MetroTech BID representative was pleased there aren't stations in their area.

DC residents know what will happen:

The system will open, and residents will realize that bike sharing is nothing like their worst fears. Neighbors will clamor for stations. Actually, many already are. Residents in Park Slope, which isn't getting Citibike yet, are eager for expansion.

Meanwhile, pass the popcorn.

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.

Currently, Capital Bikeshare's stations and kiosks serve the following functions:

1. Unlock in response to member keys and credit cards
   
2. Provide a secure locking point to deter theft
   
3. Transmit usage and billing information
   
4. Identify a known place to find bikes (by users or the bike sharing agency)
   
5. Advertise for the system (and other commercial sponsors)
   
6. Less commonly used functions, such as reporting malfunctions and extending reservations when dockblocked
   

Instead of putting these features in the station kiosks, they could all become part of the bikes themselves. The SoBi (Social Bicycles) system pictured above shows how this could work. A box attached to the bicycle contains a lock, a GPS, and wireless communication with a central computer. It unlocks in response to a rider's mobile phone or PIN code. When a rider reaches a destination, he or she locks the bike, and the station notifies the central computer.

It's easy to envision other potential features, such as a credit card reader for tourist use, or a button for reporting malfunctions. The box is solar-powered, like Capital Bikeshare stations, but could also be pedal powered.

The first system to use smart shared bikes like this is Call a Bike, still widely used in German cities, including Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich. As its name implies, a user must phone before each trip for a bike's unlocking code, then after each trip, phone again with the bike's cross street to confirm return.

However, without designated stations or accurate location information, it can be inconvenient to find a bike, and the system does not encourage use by tourists. The weBike system at the University of Maryland uses text messaging instead of phoning, but also requires bikes to be returned to fixed docks.

Currently, two "next generation" bike sharing systems in the US are going further by putting all the intelligence in the bike. These systems are viaCycle, currently operating at a small scale at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and Social Bicycles, a startup in New York.

In each of these systems, vehicles themselves communicate their locations to a central server, and users can find them using a website or mobile apps. A user unlocks a bike using his or her mobile phone and can then lock it anywhere.

These systems are analogous to the car2go car sharing system, in which cars don't have designated spaces and can be parked in any legal street location.

Smart bike systems promise a significant cost savings versus current generation systems with docks and kiosks. Adding 12 docks to an existing station costs about $13,000, while a new 12-dock station with a kiosk costs about $36,000. This cost difference is leading DDOT to expand many stations instead of adding new ones in between, where they'd be more useful but also more costly.

Social Bicycles founder Ryan Rzepecki claims that 2-4 times more smart bikes could be deployed for the same cost as current generation kiosk systems. Bike racks could also go almost anywhere, without the linear space and solar requirements of current docks.

Flexibility has advantages and disadvantages

Smart bike systems largely solve the dockblocking problem at full stations because users can lock their bike at any safe location, not just at docks.

But is it really a good idea to be able to dock bikes anywhere? It would be difficult to prevent some people from abusing the privilege, such as locking bikes in inaccessible locations (e.g., garages, courtyards, and behind security barriers). Additionally, bikes might accumulate in remote or infrequently used locations, as some have reported happening with car2go. Theft and vandalism could also become a problem; Capital Bikeshare has relatively low loss rates, thanks in part to its sturdy docks in well-traveled locations.

In addition, smart bikes do not solve the problem of empty stations, and can even add difficulty to the process of finding a bike. Bike sharing members often plan around expecting to find a certain number of bikes at a station because it makes for a convenient routine, or because they need several bikes at once for a group trip. A more flexible system would create more uncertainty and make users more reliant on smartphones, which are not available to everyone.

In fact, DDOT officials have cited predictability as a major reason they are enlarging stations: users find it particularly frustrating to find an empty or full station, so they would rather have fewer stations that are more often usable than more conveniently located, closely-spaced stations.

To make bike locations more predictable, Social Bicycles has proposed a "virtual station" concept, in which a station is just a geographic area on a map. Bikes could incur higher fees depending on how far riders park them from a virtual station. This solution gives users the flexibility to park anywhere, but ensures that most bikes will return to designated stations.

Would we use this here?

Several jurisdictions in our region are considering their own bike sharing systems. Some, fairly distant from DC and Arlington, primarily expect users to take short trips inside their systems instead of trips to and from the core.

There are many reasons for jurisdictions to join the current Capital Bikeshare network, like savings from economies of scale, and the convenience for users being able to get a bike anywhere within the network. However, systems less reliant on docks could be more cost-effective in lower-density suburban areas, where stations will be smaller and the cost of station kiosks will be a large fraction of the total budget.

Meanwhile, Capital Bikeshare is a huge success with its current, proven technology. Already, its stations are far cheaper to install and move than its predecessor system, SmartBike. Capital Bikeshare shouldn't change just as it's hitting its stride. In time, we might even see it transition toward technologies that further reduce the burden of stations.

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.

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.

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.

This data has been available for some time for London, allowing people to create animations of a day's CaBi usage and diagrams of a single bike's path over several days. The folks who built those and other tools can now even adapt their code to work for Capital Bikeshare, if they're so inclined.

Arlington, DC and Alta officials agreed in November to offer the data, after discussions with Tom Fairchild of the Mobility Lab, lab collaborator and advisor Matt Caywood, and CaBi Tracker creator Daniel Gohlke. (I am working on projects for the Mobility Lab as well, but was not involved in this specific discussion.)

To make it even easier to work with the data, Dylan Barlett imported the files into Google Fusion Tables, a tool that lets people easily sort, manipulate and visualize data.

If you put together an interesting analysis or visualization, please send it to us! We'd love to post interesting things you come up with using this or other open data.

1. Washington/Arlington, DC/VA: 140 stations
   
2. Minneapolis/Saint Paul, MN: 115 stations
   
3. Miami Beach, FL: 70 stations
   
4. Boston, MA: 61 stations
   
5. Denver, CO: 52 stations*
   
6. Madison, WI: 27 stations
   
7. Broward County, FL: 20 stations
   
8. San Antonio, TX: 20 stations
   
9. Boulder, CO: 15 stations*
   
10. Washington State University - Pullman, WA: 8 stations
    
11. Chicago, IL: 7 stations
    
12. Omaha, NE: 5 stations
    
13. University of California - Irvine: 4 stations
    
14. Des Moines, IA: 4 stations
    
15. Tulsa, OK: 4 stations
    
16. Louisville, KY: 3 stations
    
17. Kailua, HI: 2 stations
    
18. Spartanburg, SC: 2 stations

For the second straight year Washington's Capital Bikeshare was the largest system, but CaBi will begin to face more serious competition in 2012 and 2013 as a number of new cities begin to launch their own networks. Baltimore is expected to launch with 30 stations next year, Chicago may build up to 300, and most notably of all: New York is moving forward with a 600-station behemoth system.

Data for this list was compiled with the help of The Bike-Sharing Blog's excellent map of world bike sharing.

* Denver and Boulder are counted separately, but cross-honor memberships. Combined, the system has a total 67 stations.

Cross-posted at BeyondDC.

There are two reasons adding additional docks to a high-traffic neighborhood in the form of new stations instead of tacking them on to existing stations might be worth the extra money: increased customer convenience, and the potential to ease rebalancing needs.

Empty or full stations are inevitable at times. The more this happens, though, the more inconvenience it creates for users. If a customer comes to a full station with their bike and has to go another 5 blocks only to retrace their steps and walk another 2 blocks to their end destination, it won't be long before they give up Capital Bikeshare as a primary, reliable mode of transportation.

Of course, spreading docks among more, smaller stations rather than one mega-station doesn't make them less likely to be full. If 30 docks fill up at a single station, 3 clustered stations with 10 docks will probably fill up just as much, and cost more to build.

But having the 3 smaller stations gives members or potential members a shorter walk to the nearest station, making the system more valuable for everyone.

Higher station density and more new stations will undoubtedly attract new users and with them new revenue. At the same time, with strategic planning, closer stations can reduce the frequency and cost of rebalancing bikes throughout the day.

If there are 5 stations within a 3 block radius, a couple stations can be full or empty and as long as the other stations have bikes or docks, the system maintains its usability and convenience for people coming or going from that vicinity.

Currently, if the Dupont Circle station fills up or empties out, Alta has to dispatch someone pretty much immediately to rebalance, since the dearth of other immediately nearby stations will make it a huge inconvenience.

With tight station clusters in activity centers, Bikeshare could more easily monitor "levels of inconvenience" to prioritize rebalancing. If a primary station is full but there are some docks available at nearby stations, that poses only a mild inconvenience and can receive a lower priority for rebalancing.

If the biggest station is full and several of the surrounding stations are too, leaving docks available at only 1 or 2 stations in the area, that would be a medium inconvenience, and should be rebalanced sooner, meaning it might preempt another mild inconvenience situation. If all of the stations in a neighborhood were completely full, that would be a major inconvenience and require rebalancing as soon as possible.

As the system continues to grow in popularity, adding more stations in activity centers is inevitable. In some of the most popular neighborhoods, it will be virtually impossible for DDOT to build single stations that are large enough that they always have a bike or empty dock available.

It's difficult to measure whether the extra costs of new stations outweigh their benefits. What's more, beyond the cost of the station capital, each new site has to be planned, measured for size and sunlight, vetted with the community, and permitted. This process also has costs.

Eventually, though, DDOT will run into space constraints for these stations anyway, making it impossible to expand any further. While there is significant extra cost to adding new stations versus simply expanding those already in place, in the long run, the system would reap benefits. The ultimate question is whether we should prioritize expansion efforts on increasing density or increasing coverage.