Building Bikeshare Better

 The Quad Cities do not have a bikeshare system, but many larger cities do, and it's often touted as a good solution for so-called last mile solutions, as well as a way to help people start thinking about alternatives to car travel for short trips. And bikeshare systems are often quite successful! But in this post, I'd like to think about some ways that they can be better, because the systems I've seen implemented often have quite visible flaws--but fortunately, ones that are pretty easily fixable.

1. Support Them With Infrastructure

This really has two parts: infrastructure for bikes, and infrastructure for getting to bikes. 

First of all, bikeshare is only as good as the actual biking experience can be: if it's painful, dangerous, or otherwise inhospitable to bike in a city, then bikeshare is going to be inherently limited. 

I like Seattle's bikeshare options, and there were a lot of them, but actually using it seemed quite unsafe in some areas, because it was just me, a bike, and a road with cars going 30+ mph. Even when there was a "bike lane," it wasn't protected or separated. Now, this was four years ago, so it could have gotten better since, but it certainly didn't help back then.

I did like the dockless nature of many of the bikeshare bikes though, since that meant that you didn't have to find somewhere to connect them at the end of a ride.

This is much easier, though it does mean that sometimes the sidewalk has too many of the bikes just standing there, not out of the way.

The other side of this is that bikes (and bikeshare specifically) work well on their own (at least sometimes) but work even better when they're connected to a larger transportation infrastructure. As I said above, this is a great last mile solution: but that means that you have to have the other miles covered by another form of transportation (unless the city is dense enough that you don't need to go too many miles at all). Bikesharing for a 45 minute bike commute is different than bikesharing from a metro station to your actual workplace/other destination. 

This bikeshare in DC is a good example: a dock near a major transit location (Union Station) with plenty of space to park the bikes and still let traffic on the sidewalk past. Someone could take a train here, bike to a destination, then bike back and take the train back. This makes the bikeshare much more useful, especially since someone else can use the bike during the time you're at the destination.

2. Incorporate (More) E-bikes

Now, I'm not saying that bikeshare needs to be only e-bikes. After all, they're more expensive, they can run out of battery if not properly charged (however a system does charging), and they can't be user-fixed in most cases.

But!

Especially in cities with environmental or geographical elements that might make biking less pleasant (think cold, snow, hills, etc.) an e-bike can really improve the situation, especially for the kind of casual riders who are likely to use bikeshare (or at least are the target market). Big hill between you and your destination? Who cares. Too cold to bike? Well, you'll be on the bike for less time with the e-bike. Long distance from bikeshare to your final stop? It'll go faster. Too many cars? Well, at least you can keep up with them better. And so on.

Now, many bikeshare systems are indeed already doing that. But as in the above NYC example, I would suggest that not enough of the bikes are electric. Yes, Citibike has e-bikes, but that display is pretty much all acoustic bikes. And while they're getting used (see all the empty spots!) I still suggest it could be better.

3. Plan Locations and Bike Numbers Carefully

Bikeshare only works if there is predictable bikeshare where you need it--but a system can also get overstressed by having too many places for bikes so that money is getting wasted in creating the system. You can't put a bike dock on every corner (or for dockless systems, a bike on every block)--and if you have that kind of funding, you still might want to spend some of it on the infrastructure in #1 rather than solely on bikes themselves. 

Locations that are on busy streets in busy areas like this one in Toronto are a good choice. 

There's also a careful balance to be made in terms of how many bikes you provide: that station is pretty empty, but not wholly empty, which is ideal. You want to see most of the bikes getting used (see, money, above) but not all, because an empty station (or no bikes, in a dockless system) means someone who can't use the system and who is therefore less likely to rely on the system in the future and so may create a spiral reducing usage.

Too many bikes (or scooters--which I haven't really mentioned here, but follow some of the same logic) can clog up a street, especially in a dockless system, as in the above example from Seattle. And they can also perversely give the sense that no one is using the system so it must suck--a silly idea, but one that you'd be surprised how many people can fall prey to nevertheless.

Now, I'm not an engineer or city planner myself, so I can't do the calculations that would lead to the correct numbers here. But it's crucial to get them right, or you end up with an albatross of a system in the classic Samuel Taylor Coleridge sense: hung around your neck, weighing you down, and a sign to others of your faults.

Does your city have bikeshare? Or one near you? Have you used it? What do you think could make it (even) better?