The bikesharing thread

[initiald]

Plans for Raleigh’s bike-share program take shape

Read more: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/loc...155256839.html

Details:

Initial rollout of 300 bikes, 100 of which will be e-bikes, at 30 stations.

The Raleigh City Council on Tuesday agreed to begin contract negotiations with Montreal-based Bewegen and New Jersey-based Corps Logistics.

Bewegen provides equipment and programming direction, while Corps Logistics, a veteran-owned company that hires formerly homeless vets, handles operations and maintenance.

Bewegin lists as clients Birmingham, Ala.; Richmond, Va.; Baltimore; one city in Germany and four cities in Portugal. http://bewegen.com/our-system/

Expected to be operational by Spring 2018.

[M II A II R II K]

In New York City, Bike Share Is Faster Than Cabs When It Matters

https://www.citylab.com/transportati...s-most/530469/

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- Experienced cyclists know that short jaunts are often more quickly accomplished by pedal power than horsepower—especially in ultra dense, ultra congested New York City. But as the Big Apple strives to cut carbon emissions through reining in car traffic and ramping up expansion of its bike-share program, city leaders might do well to remind short-distance backseat travelers of that fact.

- About 55 percent of the taxi rides spanned less than two miles; so did the average bike-share trip. Now new research shows that for many of those cab trips, bike share would save time. In a study published in Transportation Research this month, researchers from the University of Toronto and University of Central Florida examined Citi Bike trip data (freely available through the service’s website) and taxi trip data from 2014, and found that bike share can either compete with or beat taxi speeds at the hours it matters most.

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[M II A II R II K]

China's 'dockless' bike sharing could be coming to a street near you

http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/05/tech...bal/index.html

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- Chinese startups want to export their bike-sharing revolution all around the world. The companies are rolling into the U.K., the U.S. and beyond, aiming to disrupt existing programs with their fleets of colorful bikes that don't need docking stations. --- One of China's largest operators, Mobike, unleashed 1,000 of its orange-wheeled bicycles in the rainy English city of Manchester on Thursday, marking its first foray outside of Asia. "Manchester will be a springboard into Europe," said Chris Martin, the company's head of international expansion.

- Analysts say the Chinese model is a game changer. The bikes can be locked and unlocked anywhere via a smartphone app, which means users don't have to return them to designated stations. The rapid spread of this approach across China has already thrown up problems, including mountains of discarded bikes and companies going bust. --- The startups' success helped spawn a host of smaller players that have blanketed Chinese cities with millions of dockless bikes. Companies have had problems with users stealing or vandalizing bikes, parking them in apartments or hiding them for personal use.

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[M II A II R II K]

Amsterdam Fights Back Against Rogue Bike Shares

https://www.citylab.com/transportati...-share/535791/

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- So-called “rogue bike shares” are now in the city’s crosshairs, accused of clogging up valuable bike parking space at the expense of local cyclists. The city announced this week that it intends to ban these private rental companies, which park bikes around the city for customers to rent via smartphone apps. Unlike traditional bike-share programs, these ones don’t have dedicated docks for parking and they don’t coordinate with the government to offer service around the city. Even though the rogue bike-share concept has been widely questioned as problematic, most cities might consider it a good thing to have an easy supply of rental bikes on every corner. For Amsterdam, it risks becoming a nightmare.

- It might seem improbable that bike parking could become such an issue, but more people move through Central Amsterdam by bike than by any other means of transit. Finding a suitable parking spot can be a headache for bike owners. The city has been rushing to catch up with demand lately, resorting to adventurous measures such as the creation of bike islands and subterranean bike chambers built beneath the waterfront. Parking is permitted outside official spots unless a sign expressly forbids it (warning: they often do, especially in the busiest areas). But in a city where such huge numbers move by bike, railing space gets snapped up extremely fast. Meanwhile, Amsterdam has no official bike-share scheme of its own.

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[emathias]

Originally Posted by M II A II R II K

Amsterdam Fights Back Against Rogue Bike Shares

https://www.citylab.com/transportati...-share/535791/

Kinda weird that Amsterdam doesn't have an official municipal bike share program, considering how central biking is to their transportation culture. Is that true? And, if so, what do visitors use?

[tdawg]

Citibike is expanding to Astoria big time in the next few months. I'm really excited about the stations coming to Astoria Park since I live on the park. I'll soon be able to bike from my house to the new Astoria ferry dock opening later this month.
Story from DNAinfo.

ASTORIA — The Department of Transportation has unveiled the final map of locations for Citi Bike's expansion to Astoria, with 59 docking stations to be installed throughout the neighborhood in the coming months.

The finalized stations — which the DOT has posted on its website — are similar to those the agency proposed in its draft map in April, with the exception of nine stations that were relocated based on feedback from local stakeholders.

The sites were selected based on input received during 18 meetings with Community Board 1, local elected officials and community groups, including two workshops events that were held last fall, according to the DOT.

Of the 59 stations planned for Astoria, 14 will installed in the roadbeds their respective streets, while the remainder will be located on the sidewalks, the map shows.

All will be located south of Ditmars Boulevard and North of Queens Plaza North, with the service area bound by 44th Street to the east and nearly to the waterfront on the west.

Bike docks will be placed near popular cultural spots like the Noguchi Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park and Museum of the Moving Image. Astoria Park will have four stations situated around it, while another will be placed near the new NYC Ferry landing on Hallets Point, which is slated to start running on Aug. 29.

Astoria will be only the second neighborhood in Queens to offer Citi Bike, which expanded to Long Island City in 2015.

The stations are expected to be installed by the end of this year, though they could roll out as early as September, the DOT said last week.

Link to story and map: https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/201...cation-map-dot

[M II A II R II K]

U.S. cities are being invaded by dock-less bike share. It’s going to be messy—and worth it

https://slate.com/business/2017/12/d...-s-cities.html

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- Seattle took a gamble on an innovation that has transformed China’s largest cities: dock-less bike share. Seattle permitted three private companies to deploy nearly 9,000 bikes on its streets, sidewalks, parks, and … everywhere else you could conceivably imagine a bike. The city suddenly has the second-largest fleet of shared bicycles in the United States, after New York. Riders make tens of thousands of trips daily. And it didn’t cost the city a dime.

- These bikes—bright, light, and a little dinky—have swarmed U.S. cities from the Puget Sound to Biscayne Bay. They threaten to fill every inch of urban public space with hundreds of thousands of plastic bikes. But they also promise to permanently alter the way people move around the American city. And it might take a bit of that guaranteed civic clutter to get the job done.

- For the past twelve months, Chinese cities have been in the midst of a spectacular and sometimes messy experiment: Millions of privately funded bicycles that can be ridden for a song and left anywhere at all. Most bike-share systems have docks where the bikes are stored. The docks tell you where you’ll find a bike and keep the bikes locked up when you’re done. In China, by contrast, the bikes are simply everywhere, secured by locks and GPS chips.

- Mobike claimed in May that its bikes had doubled the percentage of Chinese biking to work in selected cities, taking the share of bicycle commuters to more than 11 percent. The other major operator, Ofo, has drawn investments from e-commerce giant Alibaba and Didi, China’s version of Uber, as the company’s 2 billion 2017 bike-share trips started to eat into the short-distance ride-hailing market.

- The most exciting thing for U.S. transportation planners? How cheap these bikes are to ride. Most services work out to around a dollar a ride. “Our job is to provide transportation options, and it costs a lot less to roll out,” Gabe Klein, who oversaw bike-share systems as transportation chief in Washington and Chicago, and now serves as an adviser to the dock-less company Spin.* “We saw this huge growth in D.C., I think we more than doubled bike mode share. Now we’re going to see that on steroids.”

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[prokowave]

New Orleans' bike share program launched earlier this month:
http://www.nola.com/traffic/index.ss...ns_starts.html

Bicycle aficionados kicked off the start of New Orleans' first bike-share program Tuesday morning (Dec. 5) during a celebration at the Lafitte Greenway. The program, called Blue Bikes, so far has for-rent bicycles parked at 15 locations clustered in downtown areas up to City Park.

In all, locations for 70 pick-up and drop-off stations have been chosen on the city's East Bank, totaling 700 bicycles. Another 20 stations would be added later, upping the total to 900 bicycles.

[M II A II R II K]

El Paso and Ciudad Juárez hope to open the first system to connect both sides of the Rio Grande by the end of 2018

https://www.citylab.com/transportati...eshare/550751/

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- The cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua are considering a scheme to build an integrated binational bikeshare system between the two cities. --- The initiative, proposed by El Paso’s Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) more than a year ago, was presented at the Transportation Research Board in Washington D.C. on January 7. The project has an estimated $1 million budget, most of which would be used to construct bicycle lanes and equipment on the Juárez side, and it could open as soon as autumn 2018.

- The system would build on El Paso’s existing bikeshare system, SunCycle, which began in September 2015. The ultimate goal: a binational system with 30 stations and 300 bicycles, all of which will be available to use on either side of the Rio Grande. A binational border-spanning bikeshare might sound like an unlikely undertaking, given the tone of the current immigration debate, but to Michael Medina, executive director of El Paso’s MPO and head of the project, it’s also eminently practical for this borderland metropolis, where American corporations have established a network of maquiladoras, or factories, on the Mexican side of the river.

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[M II A II R II K]

Portland Says Adaptive Bike-Share Pilot Was a Win

https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/por...tive-bikeshare

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- Spurred on by disability rights advocates who argued that Portland, Oregon’s bike-share system discriminated against people with mobility issues, the city experimented last summer with renting out tricycles, hand cycles and side-by-side tandem bikes. Though the program is more akin to a traditional bike-rental service than bike-share, it is nonetheless an effort to extend the benefits of bike-share beyond its typical able-bodied user base.

- The Adaptive Biketown pilot ran for 14 weeks, from late July to the end of October. The city had 10 adaptive trikes, hand cycles and tandems available to rent. It cost $5 for an hour and $12 for 3 hours—an effort to match the pricing structure of the traditional two-wheeled bike-share system, called Biketown. Adaptive Biketown had 59 rentals, more than half of which were from people riding an adaptive cycle for the first time. About 40 percent of users self-identified as people with disabilities.

- Caregivers also used the adaptive cycles. Despite the relatively low rider numbers, the city considers the pilot a success and is planning to relaunch it in May. “I rode one of the tricycles on opening day,” says Deidre Hall, a member of the Portland Commission on Disability, which helped put the pilot together. “It was awesome. It was so much fun. I have a disability. The last time I rode a bike was in grade school when the town took up a collection to get me a tricycle. After I grew out of it, I didn’t ride a bike until the day of the kick-off event.”

- The Portland Bureau of Transportation partnered with Albertina Kerr, a nonprofit that works with developmentally disabled children and adults, to run Adaptive Biketown. The nonprofit already runs a bike-rental program called Kerr Bikes located on riverfront trail, the proceeds of which help fund their mission work. Kerr Bikes staff were trained to adjust the bikes for users, a process that takes about a half hour each time. Users could leave their mobility devices at the Kerr Bikes location while they were out for their rides. Because the bikes had to be picked up and dropped off at the same location—as opposed to bike-shares model of one-way trips—most renters said they were using the bikes for recreational rides.

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[harryc]

All the DIVVY stations in Oak Park are closed and being removed, called them and the operator could just confirm that yes all Oak Park stations are being removed - no explanation why, no idea if they will be back.

I had grown to rely on them - yanking them out with no notification - well that takes out the argument that DIVVY is more reliable than a cheap bike - just as.

[sukwoo]

Originally Posted by harryc

All the DIVVY stations in Oak Park are closed and being removed, called them and the operator could just confirm that yes all Oak Park stations are being removed - no explanation why, no idea if they will be back.

I had grown to rely on them - yanking them out with no notification - well that takes out the argument that DIVVY is more reliable than a cheap bike - just as.

The village voted to not renew its contract with Divvy. They did not feel that $200k/year was a worthwhile investment given the very low usage statistics.

[M II A II R II K]

Sacramento Has a Plan to Prevent Bike-Share Blight

https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/sac...e-share-blight

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- Sacramento, California, came late to the bike-sharing game. Because city officials never created a publicly funded municipal system (and because they’re in Sacramento, seat of California’s notoriously regulation-happy government), they’re having to put the cart before the horse, somewhat — or the bike-trailer before the bike, as the case may be — and devise a system of laws tailored to a changing and increasingly privatized industry.

- This week, City Council’s Law and Legislation Committee unanimously approved an ordinance that would ban riders from leaving bicycles in any position that would block sidewalks or bike paths, according to a Sacramento Bee editorial. It would apply to all bicyclists and bike-share companies, but the regulations are of course targeted at the startups that allow riders to pick up and drop off bikes anywhere with the help of a smartphone app. U.S. cities that have embraced this newer model, which came of age in China, include Seattle, New Orleans and Washington, D.C.

- “Without regulation, bicycle-share businesses pose a threat to the public health, safety and welfare,” the ordinance states. “Some bicycle-share bicycles may be self-locked anywhere within the city, making it difficult for the city to ensure that these bicycles are placed safely, upright and out of the way of pedestrian walkways, bicycle paths, and roadways. Bicycle-share bicycles will also increase demand for the city’s limited bicycle parking. In addition, derelict self-locking bicycles can become a major cause of blight in both residential and nonresidential neighborhoods.”

- Bike-share companies would have two hours to retrieve stray bicycles upon notification, the Bee reports. If companies don’t go and get those offending bikes, they could be fined and their permits could be suspended or revoked. The city would then impound their bicycles. The proposed laws, which will go before the full council in the next two months, are certainly more stringent than many of the city’s peers. It’s possible that, if adopted, Sacramento’s ordinance will prove a popular model

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[M II A II R II K]

Florida seeks to unify dockless bike regulations across the state

http://statescoop.com/florida-bill-c...ross-the-state

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- State lawmakers in Florida have proposed a bill that would give the state control over dockless bike sharing, setting a single set of state regulations that overrule city authority or opposition to the bikes. House Republicans Jackie Toledo and James Grant introduced the bill, HB 1033, last December and it is now being reviewed by the House Commerce Committee. The legislation attempts to empower the state to regulate bikes that do not require a rental station for pickup or dropoff.

- Dockless bikes are rented through mobile apps, tracked through GPS and are designed to be left anywhere a normal bike can be legally locked. A summary of the bill says that its intent is "to provide Florida residents with access to innovative, environmentally friendly transportation options and to ensure the safety and reliability of dockless bicycle sharing services within the state." --- Though popular internationally, dockless bikes have received pushback in cities like San Francisco where city and county authorities halted an attempt to launch the bikes by the Chinese company Bluegogo, which has since gone out of business. Opposition there stemmed from a fear that the bikes would clutter city streets as they have in China.

- The bill would give the state full authority over dockless bikes. The companies operating in Florida include Spin and LimeBike. "Dockless bicycles and dockless bicycle sharing companies shall be governed exclusively by state law," the bill reads. This "preemption" also prohibits cities from taxing the dockless bike companies, requiring them to obtain local business licenses or restricting their operation in any way. However, the bill does make an exception for operation around airports.

- Despite the broad protections given to dockless bike companies, the bill makes an effort to regulate bad actors. Operators are responsible for making sure their bikes are stationed legally and must have at least $500,000 in liability insurance for each instance of bodily injury and property damage that results from the bikes. If passed, the act would take effect on July 1, 2018.

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[M II A II R II K]

LYFT ANNOUNCES ENTRANCE INTO BIKE SHARE IN BALTIMORE

https://www.moderncities.com/article...e-in-baltimore

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- Lyft has entered into a partnership with Baltimore Bike Share, on the heels of Uber's entrance into the San Francisco bike-share market. Lyft has entered into an agreement with the City of Baltimore and Baltimore Bike Share to transform bike-share stations into what the company is calling “co-located transportation hubs”. Lyft’s foray into bike-share comes on the heels of Uber’s entrance into San Francisco’s new dockless bike-share pilot. The San Francisco-based rideshare company will pay $270,000 to sponsor five Baltimore Bike Share stations for three years. These hubs will serve as Lyft pickup and drop-off locations, as well as a traditional bike share pickup/drop-off station.

- The Lyft app will be integrated into the Baltimore bike-share app, and vice-versa. Although users cannot reserve a bike from Lyft’s app, they will be eligible for 50 percent off up to two rides to or from any of the Lyft-branded stations between now and February 28th, 2018. It is interesting to note that Uber users do have the ability to both rent bikes and hail a car through that company’s bike-share program in San Francisco. “Whether someone is taking a Lyft ride from the suburbs to the city and hopping on a bike around downtown, or taking a bike to one of these hubs and meeting a Lyft driver for a trip to the other side of town, the multimodal transportation future is very bright for Baltimore,” said Mike Heslin, Lyft’s Baltimore Market Manager, in a statement.

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[M II A II R II K]

ZAGSTER PARTNERS FOR SUBURBAN BIKE SHARE

https://www.moderncities.com/article...ban-bike-share

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- The days of believing bike share programs can only work in urbanized areas with significant bike infrastructure may be coming to an end as Florida's St. Lucie County partners with Zagster to launch suburban bike sharing system. With a population density of 486 people per square mile, St. Lucie County isn't a place the average person would equate with being pedestrian or bicycle friendly. Nevertheless, despite what others believe may not be possible isn't stopping St. Lucie County from developing a unique bike sharing program to serve an area with dispersed development.

- Armed with a $63,000 Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) grant and $27,000 in county funds, St. Lucie County has teamed up with Zagster to establish a two-year trial bike sharing program serving areas within its two largest cities, Port St. Lucie (pop. 185,132) and Fort Pierce (pop. 45,295). Consisting of nine bike stations and 50 cruiser bicycles, the new countywide bike-share program is intended to increase connectivity and mobility throughout the county. Unlike systems commonly found in urbanized districts, the initial bike stations are a mile to four miles apart to cover a larger area.

- According to county transportation planner and transit systems coordinator, David Engel, they've discovered that although there are a fewer amount of trips, the duration of the average suburban bicycle trip is longer. So if station locations exceed five miles a part, the connectivity becomes more limited. However, for the system to be ultimately sustainable and expand, the county will need to be successful in securing financial support from local institutions and businesses. In the meantime, the partnership between Zagster and the county calls for the county to pay the bike sharing company to maintain and operate the system.

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[202_Cyclist]

Dockless bikeshare operator, Lime Bike, is now offering electric scooter rentals in DC. I saw this pair of scooters in Georgetown last weekend.

[Sun Belt]

I downloaded the LimeBike app and took a scooter out for a spin. When you first sign up for LimeBike you have 3 - $1 credits. The cost was $1 to unlock and 15 cents per minute. It was fun, but even though it said on the app that that particular scooter had a range of 7.9 miles left on the charge, it seemed a little sluggish and after I unlocked it, my app then told me that the battery was low and it would be slow to start. Top speed I managed to get on it was 9 m.p.h.

For a regular bike it's $1 for 30 minutes.

Bird scooters are everywhere.

[M II A II R II K]

NYC Has a Bike-Share System That Works. Why Aren’t We Expanding It?

Read More: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2018/04/...-expanding-it/

Instead of extending the usefulness of Citi Bike to more of the city, a two-tiered system could emerge in which neighborhoods outside the current Citi Bike service area get frozen out, left only with access to sparser dockless networks.

- DOT announced last week that 12 companies have expressed interest in participating in the agency’s dockless bike-share pilot. Details are fuzzy, but we know that whichever companies are selected by the city will operate outside the existing Citi Bike service area, where Motivate holds exclusive rights. The line from City Hall is that the new services could enable New York to extend bike-share to neighborhoods where Citi Bike doesn’t reach. But there are reasons to be skeptical that relying solely on the dockless services is a good or fair way to extend bike-share access. While dockless bike-share systems are generating lots of trips in Chinese cities, where the bikes are everywhere, the story in America is different so far.

- In Seattle, three dockless bike-share companies run a combined fleet of more than 9,000 bikes. While precise figures aren’t available, the bikes appear not to get much use — less than one trip per bike each day, compared to an average of about five daily trips per bike for Citi Bike. The companies are also hesitant to expand much more because they don’t want to hire more people to maintain their bikes, Seattle DOT’s bike-share director told the Seattle Times. --- In DC, which invited dockless bike-share companies to launch in limited volumes last fall, usage per bike is less than one-third the level of the station-based Capital Bikeshare, according to data collected by Transit, a trip planner for mobile devices. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, however, since the dockless services are much smaller than CaBi.

- Typically offering trips for $1 per ride, the dockless services, buoyed by venture capital, can undercut the upfront cost of Citi Bike subscriptions (though a $169 annual Citi Bike pass is a better value per trip for anyone who uses it four times a week). They can also be deposited anywhere within the designated service area, unlike Citi Bikes, which must be parked at open docks. --- Finding a working dockless bike to begin your trip can get tricky though. Like station-based bike-share, if the system isn’t rebalanced, large areas can turn into bike deserts. Observers in DC and Seattle also found a significant rate of major defects, with 12 percent of the bikes diagnosed with problems like faulty brakes or busted lights.

- Motivate is one of the 12 companies that responded to DOT’s request and is expected to offer its own dockless service as part of the pilot. In the meantime, however, momentum has been sapped from the continued expansion of Citi Bike, depriving neighborhoods of access to a system that’s already proven its utility in the city. --- Motivate had been in talks with City Hall to expand its fleet by another 50 percent, with the service area reaching parts of the Bronx. But Mayor de Blasio did not want the next round of bike-share expansion to replace on-street parking spaces, according to one source familiar with the negotiations. Enter the dockless bike-share companies, which don’t come attached to stations that occupy curb space.

- The irony is that any bike-share system, dockless or station-based, is bound to stir up crankiness when it debuts in a new place. The introduction of dockless bike-share in U.S. cities hasn’t been immune to griping at all. As TransAlt Executive Director Paul Steely White told AM New York, “The city can’t opt out of facing that political reality that you still need to reorganize street space to accommodate even dockless bike share.” It’s valuable for the city to see how dockless bike-share services function here. But experimenting with new options is no excuse to stop expanding the current system, which works very well.

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[muertecaza]

Copenhagen Bike share system taken offline by hackers

https://cyclingindustry.news/copenha...ne-by-hackers/

A manual reboot of the entire fleet of Bycyklen bike share bikes, some 1,860 in total, has been required following what could be the first instance of hacking on a bike share scheme.

In what could prove a further headache to bike share operators, it appears that hackers managed to access and delete the firm’s entire database in what was described as a “primitive” hack. The firm suspects the invasion was undertaken by somebody with personal knowledge of the system.

“We apologize for the inconveniences this has caused to our users on this otherwise lovely sunny day, but we expect that we can again offer Sunday and Copenhagen visitors to easily get around the city on the white electric bikes,” said the firm.

Bycyklen’s operations in Stavenger and Utrecht were not affected by the hack.

As of Wednesday the business is back in operation, with the on board tablets all reset and ready to roll.