Early numbers for the two private bikeshare companies in Seattle are promising, or at least better than the numbers that Pronto used to get. The stationless aspect certainly adds a new level of convenience for the travel, and the pricing is attractive.
SDOT’s policy allows each company’s bike fleet to double in size each month, up to 2,000 in September. But by then, summer will be winding down and we won’t see the full potential of these systems until the following year.
Cascade Bicycle Club is encouraging people to take action, and ask SDOT to change the rule to allow faster deployment. Have a look and say your piece!
Stationless bikeshare looks so successful that I’m glad we didn’t go with Pronto 2. I see the bikes parked all around in places I never saw Pronto, and a couple days ago I actually saw somebody ride up and leave a bike in an alley I was walking past. It made me think of riding it from Capitol Hill to downtown, although I’m still not ready to take the plunge. It’s also neat that multiple private companies can exist and operate without public subsidy.
Meanwhile San Francisco is expanding a bikeshare (Citylab) operated by Motivate — the same company that operated Pronto — with docking stations. I kind of feel sad for them and am glad we’re going a different way. The map in the article shows future coverage in certain San Francisco neighborhoods. There’s a controversy in the 24th & Mission area where the neighborhood rejected bikeshare because they believed it would benefit gentrifiers more than poor minority residents. This creates a gap where the neighborhoods on three sides have stations but not the middle Mission itself. In contrast, a stationless system would allow bikes to go anywhere in the city, without docks consuming space, and we’d see where people really want to ride, and the biggest impact on Mission residents might be just, perhaps, too many parked bikes everywhere. But those bikes would be taken out again quickly in such a dense pedestrian area, so the turnover wouldn’t be much longer than the time of a pedestrian visiting the area for an errand or appointment.
I wonder what it would take to get one of these vendors to start accepting ORCA cards. The ability to transfer for free between bike and bus or train could be huge.
I’m all for this, but logistically I’m not sure how it would work. While it’d be awesome to tap on and off of a bike, it’d be tough to put a card reader on every bike.
More to the point, the companies that are operating the bike share are, as far as I can tell, hoping to make money on their venture. How precisely do you intend for them to get paid: are you planning to increase fares, raise taxes, cut service, or delay capital expenditures? Would any of these options be politically acceptable?
Most of today’s smartphones have the hardware to read data from ORCA cards (and a few have the software), they just can’t communicate with ORCA servers. ORCA cards also have ID numbers printed on them, so any (yet-to-be-developed) non-smartphone interface might rely on users typing in numbers (and maybe saving them server-side).
I don’t think ORCA was designed for this kind of usage scenario, where the card readers aren’t fully trusted… I suspect that allowing any untrusted smartphone to call in ORCA transactions would introduce some security or spoofing problems that couldn’t be fixed without significant changes to the system. So I doubt it will ever come to this version of the ORCA system. But the next version isn’t too many years off…
Regarding logistics, I’d hope it would be possible to have the bikeshare computer system bill the ORCA system on the back end rather than putting a card reader on each bike. Enter your ORCA card number on their website once and they’ll take care of the rest when you take a bike. Perhaps I’m wrong about that though.
As to the question of financing, it’s not clear to me that this would necessarily be a bad thing for transit providers. The public subsidy for a typical transit trip is much more than $1. Instead of viewing this as a way to remove money from the transit system, you could consider the bike share to be an extension of the system with a much lower operational cost. Why shouldn’t we explore ways to encourage people to use a lower-cost mode, rather than discouraging it by having a completely separate fare system? If 10% of the people with bus passes chose to use bike share for part of their commute instead of traditional buses, you could eliminate the occasional peak express trip and likely save more money than you end up giving to the bike share company.
Vancouver’s Motivate bikeshare isn’t integrated with the Compass payment system, but does let you link your Compass NFC card to your bikeshare account and use it as the key. Or a cards read a unique identifier number and a private bikeshare could easily do this.
So cut service.. Okay which routes?
For that matter, how does the same argument not apply to the (much more generally useful) Car2Go?
I wonder where the farthest Lime / Spin bikes have ventured — Bainbridge? North Bend?
I see a lot of bikes perched near bus stops — this seems really smart to me, and precisely what you can’t achieve with stationed bike share.
I’ve done some exploring around through the app, and have found bikes taken up the Interurban and Sammamish River Trails as far as Renton, Woodinville, and downtown Redmond. Given enough time, I can easily envision a steady stream of bikes available all throughout the trail system, well beyond Seattle. That said, the bikes are mostly going to expand primarily along the flat trail routes. Getting to North Bend from anywhere closer in requires a lot of up and down, so not likely to happen for quite some time.
I was on Bainbridge this weekend and saw a couple of LimeBikes there.
It might make sense to “put the brakes” on a fast ramp up of these bike services. There’s already an article up on King 5 about the haphazardly way people park these bikes, and it is an issue that the city needs to monitor before it gets out of hand.