Rolling Along the Last Mile

By Lisa Selin Davis

The problem was access. Not as in "I live in a neighborhood without a bike-share program," or as in "I don't have enough money to rent this bike." It's embarrassing to admit, but I couldn't wrest the bicycle from the jaws of the rack as I stood on the corner of Third Avenue and 58th Street in midtown Manhattan, amid a sea of the iconic blue bikes that make up the fleet of Citi Bike, New York City's bicycle-sharing program, the nation's largest.

After I realized that the bike needed to be lifted and not pulled, I was almost ready to ride. My iPhone Citi Bike app told me where the docking stations were, but they didn't chart the location of the city's 573 miles of bike lanes, many of which opened only in the last few years. (The city's transportation department told me that Droid apps do reveal bike lanes.) At least I'd remembered to bring my helmet.

Once I ventured into the frightening traffic along Third Avenue (for the record, no bike lane there), I could see Citi Bike's appeal. I zoomed past the clouds of pedestrians clustered on the sidewalks, their faces buried in their phones, and past cars as well (the drivers also using phones). I noticed details of the type that had eluded me for years — a man pacing in a second story window, intricately carved gargoyles above a building's entrance. I was alert, not just because bike riding requires it but because I was one of the only people on the streets free of technology. It was fun, and (relatively) easy.

There was only one major problem: The one place I needed to go lacked a docking station — a slice of the Upper East Side that's nearly three-quarters of a mile from the nearest subway. New York City's bike share, in its current state, couldn't get me there. Yet.

Quick history

The world's first official bike-sharing program opened in the Netherlands in 1965. The signature white bikes were free and unlocked; within one month most of them had been stolen or badly damaged. That intriguing idea remained mostly dormant until it could fuse with 21st century technology. These days, GPS systems can track bikes; apps and websites can reveal how many are left at docking stations and where those stations are.

When Paris opened its bike-sharing program, called Vélib, in 2007, it offered 18,000 bikes and 1,200 stations, monitored by an electronic system that charts the locations of bikes and charges patrons if they're lost or late. By 2012, Vélib users had logged more than 130 million trips.

Vélib's success sparked interest around the world. "It was really a game changer," says Kate Fillin-Yeh, an urban planner and director of the bike-share program at the New York City Department of Transportation.

That same year, Tulsa, Oklahoma, opened the U.S.'s first bike-share program, with a couple of dozen bikes at solar-powered stations, but it wasn't until 2010, when Capital Bikeshare opened in Washington, D.C., that other major American cities began to notice. "The nation's biggest cities, with the most complex, densest population bases, are figuring out how to do this," says David Howard, executive editor at Bicycling Magazine.

Within three years, bike-sharing programs had popped up in the Twin Cities, Denver, Miami, Boston, and New York, but they also opened in smaller or heartland cities: Omaha, Fort Worth, and Greenville, South Carolina, among others. Adoption in smaller places is "one of the things that makes bike share so impressive," Howard adds.

Rolling right along

The industry is growing so quickly that it's hard to keep up with the statistics. At the time of this writing, there are 34 bike-share programs in the U.S., but those in the industry say that could increase by 50 percent in the next five years. 

Citi Bike — which began operation in 2013 — was a test case. "If New York City can do it, and do it big and do it successfully, then other places can do it too," says Howard. And indeed, Citi Bike users have logged more than seven million miles and six million trips since launch. "It's successful beyond what anyone imagined," says Fillin-Yeh.

The wild popularity of bike-sharing programs seems independent of weather or topography. Phoenix's bike share is opening later this year, despite the stifling heat, and the Twin Cities' bike-share program is open into November (then put away for the winter so as not to hinder snow removal).

"Boston was a horrible place to ride, but they've really worked to increase their bike network, and it was a success beyond anyone's wildest dreams," says Steve Hoyt-McBeth, project manager of the Portland (Oregon) Bureau of Transportation's Bike Share, currently readying for launch.

"We have 36,000 trips a day in the summer," says Fillin-Yeh of New York. "In the gross cold wet this winter, we had 3,000 to 6,000 every day. It's become part of our everyday life."

Bike shares' boom comes at a time when the "sharing economy" — businesses like Zipcar and Airbnb — is growing. It also comes as many are hungering for more public transit and complete streets. Most important, bike share is seen as an environmental and affordable alternative to commuting.

"Cities are becoming a lot more expensive, and bike share can help people reduce their transportation costs," says Hoyt-McBeth. Yearly Citi Bike memberships cost $95, while a one-month unlimited MetroCard costs $112. According to the Earth Policy Institute, D.C. bike sharers are saving on average $800 in yearly transportation costs.

"It's a new kind of public transportation system being overlaid in the cities, to meet this demand for short trips," says Martha Roskowski, Green Lane project director for the nonprofit People for Bikes, a group that advocates the building of protected bike lanes — those separated from traffic. Bike share complements subways and buses, but is much faster, easier, and cheaper to implement than either of them. New Yorkers have been waiting for the Second Avenue subway since it was first proposed in 1929; it took Citi Bike less than three years from concept to opening day, and that was with a Hurricane Sandy-related delay.

That last mile

In addition to lauding its relative affordability and simplicity, planners see bike share as a way to solve the "last mile" problem: getting from a transit hub to the final destination.

"It's a great new opportunity for how we think about access to public spaces and connections between places," says Jonathan Cohn, an architect and urban designer with Perkins Eastman who specializes in transportation and public spaces. "All of a sudden, trips you can make are not limited to the half-mile that people are willing to walk; it's now a three-mile or five-mile radius." In Phoenix, adding stations to the pockets of density within a few miles of the city's relatively new light rail could keep more cars off the road.

Reducing car commuting is also good for the environment. Portland's impending bike-share program is an outgrowth of its environmental policy.

"There's a healthy reliance on bicycling to help us meet some of our carbon-reduction goals," says Hoyt-McBeth. "We want to increase bicycling to about 25 percent of all commute trips by 2030 [from six percent now]."

Portland was voted Bicycling Magazine's bike-friendliest city in 2012, before it had bike sharing, but other bike-sharing programs are showing that success is possible even if much of the infrastructure wasn't up to snuff when they opened.

Ready or not

Design protocols are well established for streets and highways, but bike-sharing programs have sprouted before anybody has really had time to prepare for them. Few of our streets were designed with bicycles in mind, and the Federal Highway Administration's traditional Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials' Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets (aka "the green book") are only starting to define policy for bike infrastructure.

The National Association of City Transportation Officials has created an Urban Bikeway Design Guide, but, says Roskowski, "in most places the network is not complete; there are design challenges."

The planning community plays an enormous role in meeting them. "Often you see transportation planners thinking of this as a nice fringe benefit," says Jennifer Godenzo, director of planning at the New York City-based bicycle advocacy group Transportation Alternatives. "But really they need to reorient and think of it as an integral part of the planning for their communities. It's up to planners to make sure that these ideas translate into road design."

This means continuing to plan and advocate for what Roskowski describes as a "low-stress network": protected bike lanes linked to separated pathways and slow-speed side streets augmented by traffic-calming initiatives.

Yet in some cases, supply can precede demand: Bike-share programs increase bike ridership, which prompts a new class of riders to demand more and better bike lanes. "Bike lanes and bike share are complementary," says Roskowski. "We see it happening in both directions, the two transformative things that cities are doing right now." You can build bike share and the lanes will come, or you can do it the opposite way.

Safety concerns

It may seem dangerous to flood the streets with riders without first laying out bike lanes, especially when safety concerns are the biggest barrier to increasing bike ridership. "It's one thing to have the bikes, and it's another thing to feel safe on them," says Fillin-Yeh.

Few bike-share programs offer helmets, although members often get discounts when they purchase helmets at local bike shops. And making them compulsory causes a steep decline in ridership, according to Ryan Rzepecki, an urban planner and CEO of Social Bicycles, a bike-share technology provider with equipment deployed in Buffalo; Hailey, Idaho; and San Francisco, and projects coming to Phoenix, Tampa, Las Vegas, and Hamilton, Ontario, in 2014.

"We've seen some cities repeal helmet laws in advance of launching" bike-share programs, he says.

Will helmetless riders make biking safer for all? "Research has shown that the more cyclists there are on a given road or in a given city, the safer it is to ride for everyone," says Howard. Bike share seemingly brings more people to bicycling and encourages bicyclists to ride more.

Fillin-Yeh says New York City has long been upgrading its bike infrastructure. The city now has 573 miles of bike lanes, and commuter cycling increased by 26 percent between 2008 and 2009; it has more than doubled since 2005. Still, the city has only 31 miles of protected bike lanes. While there have been no fatalities on Citi Bike, midtown Manhattan can be a scary place to ride. Yet it has the highest density of docking stations.

Dollar magnets

Despite the complications and safety concerns, bike-sharing programs are now a marketing plus. "It'll be seen as an essential part of local transportation," says Rzepecki. "It will be in any city with any amount of density that wants to attract young workers to their town."

The economic benefits have been touted as well. One study found that each ride in the Twin Cities' Nice Ride system added $7 to $14 to the local economy, according to the Earth Policy Institute. Vélib is so popular that it is a product brand, selling iPhone covers, tea cozies, umbrellas, and mugs.

Sometimes the programs cost the local government very little. Financing for bike-sharing programs is varied. "It's everything you could possibly imagine," says Roskowski: private, nonprofit, federal, state, municipal, and sometimes a patchwork of all of them. Citi Bike, while planned and promoted by the New York City DOT, is privately funded: Citi Bank paid $41 million to be the title sponsor — its logo graces all 10,000 bikes and 600 stations — while MasterCard contributed $6.5 million.

"It's a public transit system that is being funded almost solely by private capital," says Hoyt-McBeth. The system is operated by Alta Bike, which also operates Capital Bikeshare, Chicago's Divvy, and Boston's Hubway, among other major bike-sharing programs.

Portland's impending bike share is funded by private sponsorship and federal grants, and Chicago's Divvy system, owned by the Chicago Department of Transportation, was funded by federal grants. San Francisco's Bay Area Bike Share was funded mostly by a variety of local government agencies. BikeWalkKC, the umbrella group that runs Kansas City's B-cycle, is currently attempting to expand its program through crowdfunding.

If there's an Achilles heel of these programs, it's that their success depends on consistent funding, and some of the smaller cities might have a harder time attracting private funding. "If these systems are going to continue in cities, most bike-share systems will need some level of public support," says Roskowski.

In March, the Wall Street Journal outlined the threats posed to the economic sustainability of Citi Bike. It reported that New York City's new transportation commissioner, Polly Trottenberg, said Citi Bike faced "a number of financial and operational challenges" and that "We are working as diligently as we can to help the company resolve them and strengthen the program going forward." We don't know the details of those challenges, other than that the managers are reportedly on the hunt for a large infusion of capital.

The Journal reported a number of issues, including software glitches (though that wasn't an issue for me). Then there was the weather. During the unexpected polar vortex, which wrought havoc on the northeast for much of the winter, daily ridership — reportedly the meat of Citi Bike's income — went down. Yearly memberships, however, increased, which means New Yorkers, rather than tourists, are the current bread and butter. And this has implications for other bike-share programs, like Portland's impending one, which would depend heavily on tourist dollars. (Presumably tourists and locals there are prepared to ride in the rain, and weather won't be as much of a problem.)

New York doesn't use public funding, and perhaps its reported struggles undermine the claim that it's possible to run a bike-share program without government money. With cities claiming that bike-share programs are integral to their marketability, it might make sense to budget for them, even if the pilot project is privately funded.

Making Citi Bike more attractive to tourists requires the same efforts that makes it attractive to New Yorkers: more bikes, more funds, more riders. But if it can't make it here, can it make it anywhere? That remains to be seen.

Affordable?

That support is the only way bike sharing can truly blossom as a new mode of public transit. For while low-income residents are the most common users of mass transit in most cities, bike share is almost exclusively used by people of means. In 2012 the Federal Highway Administration issued a report noting that "use of bike share systems by [low-income] communities has so far been limited in the U.S., despite their increased reliance on public transit and historically low rates of auto ownership." Hoyt-McBeth calls it "the equity challenge."

Boulder, Denver, and D.C. have reduced rate memberships for low-income riders. In Boston, low-income users can get $5 annual memberships, and the fee includes a helmet. But the percentage of low-income riders is still extraordinarily small. The average bike-share user, according to Transportation Alternatives, is young, male, and high income; one-half of one percent of Citi Bike users are low income, and the percentages are similar in other cities. 

One way to increase low-income ridership is to place docking stations near needier neighborhoods — though some of those neighborhoods don't fit the profile for the best locale. Docking stations should be situated where density is greatest — places already served by some form of transit — but, "where you have the most density is not always where you have the greatest distribution of income," Hoyt-McBeth says.

In New York City large swaths of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx are underserved by the subway. The Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood of Red Hook, which includes single-family homes, multifamily apartments, housing projects, and big box stores like IKEA, lost its trolley in the 1950s; only two bus lines connect it to the subway, more than 1.5 miles away from some parts of the neighborhood.

Red Hook could benefit greatly from Citi Bike stations, but there are no plans yet to place it there. The planned expansion of the program will bring thousands more bikes to neighborhoods like the Upper West Side in Manhattan and Cobble Hill in Brooklyn ("Citi Bike Expanding to More Rich Neighborhoods," New York Magazine sniped). Less tony neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Astoria will also be served.

Cohn says bringing Citi Bike to "public transit deserts" can attract development and new business. "We don't have to invest in transit infrastructure and then wait for private investment to follow," he says. "It's the other side of the coin: Real potential and value can be uncovered or unleashed by better access."

Still, challenges persist. At least a half-dozen lawsuits have been filed against the city over the placement of Citi Bike stations (in underserved neighborhoods people desperately want them, but in already thriving neighborhoods, they're sometimes unwelcome), but some of Citi Bike's problems stem from its very popularity.

"The program is so popular that during peak use hours the bikes tend to leave certain stations faster than they can be replenished," says Godenzo. "There have been a lot of rebalancing issues." The system, she says, can't handle the demand (one could say the same of the subway at rush hour). She admits, though, "that's a good problem to have."

Lisa Selin Davis is a freelance writer covering urban planning, housing, real estate, architecture, and design.

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Images: Top — Despite a bad winter, technical errors, and lower-than-anticipated day pass sales, New York City's Citi Bike is growing in popularity. In March, the program celebrated its 100,000th annual member, and its riders pedaled their seven millionth mile. Photo Michael Appleton, The New York Times. Middle — In 2007, Paris launched its bike-sharing program, Vélib, which logged more than 130 million trips as of 2012. Vélib's success sparked interest around the world. Today, there are 30 bike-share programs in the U.S., and that number continues to grow. Photo courtesy itdp.org. Bottom — The 2010 launch of Capitol Bikeshare in Washington, D.C., showed other major American cities it could be done. Photo courtesy itdp.org.