noglider 

What 22 Million Rides Tell Us About NYC Bike-Share

yashinon

i wish all cities had the Citi Bikes. What a wonderful thing for NYC. Love seeing so many people on bikes!

vol

Since one has to change bike after every 30 or 45 minutes, if the same person rode A -> B ->C, it was counted as two trips in the study?

(Interesting to see the hour-of-day stats)

dunelt_1954

We got a similar bike sharing scheme here in Indianapolis several years ago. Thanks for the link to the N.Y. stats, I think I'll share that with our new Mayor's office.

JanMM

Truly amazing to see so many of those Pacers BikeShare yellow bikes riding around the heart of Indy. Amazing to see so many bikes, generally, compared to a decade or two ago.

noglider 

I'm sure it's counted as two trips.

Also, note that the author assumed that the trips were made on the shortest possible route, which means miles are very much underestimated.

Dahon.Steve

Good article.

We have to hope the "Bike Share Transit Act" passes and cities start receiving government funding. This is huge and it's almost like the annual ridership of a bus line!

mconlonx

Since I was in Boston on a regular basis, they instated a bike-share program. And now, whenever I go down there I am pleased to see the racks of bikes, including one not far from where I frequently stay. In the section where I stay -- Hampshire St., near Inman Sq. in Cambridge -- there is a bike lane, and whenever I'm out walking, I almost never fail to see at least one, usually a few of the bike share bikes out and about.

kickstart

Here in Seattle the bike share program is a flop, something like only 130,000 rides a year, excessive need to shuttle bikes to the many up hill stations, and may go away if not bailed out. Hills, and rain seem to be the major issues.
Advocates say the 50 stations need to be expanded to 250 stations for the program to be successful.

noglider 

That's nice. But to understand how popular Citi Bike in NYC is, popular beyond anyone's expectations or hopes, if you want to see one person or several people on Citi Bike, you don't have to move. You may have to turn your head, but they are visible everywhere in many parts of Manhattan, at all times.

scott967

Opinions I've seen in the past on NYC bike-share, is that people just use the citi-bikes instead of owning one. So it doesn't really add new riders. ISTR they were going to jigger the rates to make it less appealing for regular users.

scott s.
.

stdlrf11

At least you have fifty stations..... Dallas has ONE.

Ft. Worth has a good bikeshare network. Every time I'm in town I see folks whizzing around on them. I think I saw a figure of around 1 million miles a year.

mr_bill

Well, I myself moved a couple of the pronto bikes up the hill last week. (They are geared for going up, not down hills. It's pretty easy to run out of top gear even going down the infamous 2nd Ave bike lane though.)

The city is in the process of taking it over unless one politician continues to get in the way as far as I can tell. It's in primary operating balance already, and would be operating in the black if it pursued grants and additional sponsorships in the 2nd half of last year. Worst transition of ownership ever btw.

Dallas has *two* stations in one park, which is pretty much the minimum sized system. (A single station bike share isn't.)

-mr. bill

noglider 

@kickstart, it could well be true that you need more stations to make the program work. I have a pie-in-the-sky vision of painting all of NYC with Citi Bike stations.

@scott967, I do not believe that the program has only people who formerly owned bikes. I see plenty of people who look like they were not on bikes before Citi Bike came in.

The only failure I know of is that it seems not to have gotten people out of cars. Instead, it got them off mass transit. That's still a gain, because many trains and buses are severely overcrowded, and the population is expected to grow further. We need many measures to prevent overloading the system, and Citi Bike is one that works.

kickstart

To be honest, I'm not really following it that closely, I just know our bike share program isn't doing well compared to most. Personally I would like it to succeed, but wouldn't want to continue throwing good money after bad if it could be used for improving the infrastructure that is used.

mr_bill

Surviving the first year is great news. Seattle really hurt itself with announcing the ownership change then moving so slowly on executing the change.

You are throwing good money after good is really what you are talking about here.

And spending more money on bike share does *NOT* take money out of infrastructure expansion and improvement. Boston proved that. Complete confidence that Nicole Freedman will prove it again in Seattle.

-mr. bill

kingston 

Seems like not everyone is so excited about the program

Harlem activists fight Citibike program expansion, slam it as 'gateway to gentrification'

vol

So if Citibike excludes Harlem and the Bronx, it's discrimination (I remember news reports of such complaints). If it's expanded there, it's gateway to gentrification.

dpeters11

I want more with B-Cycle, they have reciprocity.

buzzman

Thanks for this thread.

It was kind of fun to do a thread search of "Citibike" back to when the program first started and re read the prognosticators of doom at all levels. How it won't work, bikes were no good, newbie/helmetless riders will die in droves on the streets of NYC etc...

What I enjoy of having been on BF's for 10+ years is revisiting old A&S threads to look for the accuracy of the posts that spread fear about the future as a result of every new bike lane, bike path, sharrow, helmet, bike share program, federally or locally financed incentives. Had those cynical soothsayers had their way there would be no bike lanes, no new bike paths, no bikes share and we would be a small, disappearing tribe of hearty souls mixing it up with motorized traffic that was largely hostile or completely clueless as to why we were not in a car, which is basically the world as I knew it in the 1960's, 70's, 80's and 90's.

B. Carfree

Where in the world were you in the '60s and '70s? Out here in the west we had a HUGE (is that Yuge on the (L)east coast?) bike boom. In fact, more bikes were sold in 1974 than in any year before or since and, at least out here, they were ridden. The Bicycle Capital of the World came to be in Davis in the '70s with almost no separated infrastructure. Sure, the bikes all but vanished in the '90s (while extensive bike infra was being built, which is perhaps merely coincidental), but it was pure joy to ride down streets amongst several thousand people on bikes with not a car in sight.

I guess it was different on the (L)east coast. Too bad for you. I suppose that's part of the reason I never felt any need to spend much time back there.

Oddly, where I'm living now there has been a burst of buffered bike lanes, cycle-tracks and such. While I'm a big fan of a properly done bike lane and I choose to live next to the main bike path in the city, I strongly dislike these newer implementations. All too often they serve merely to push bikes off into the door-zone or gutters and out of the sight lines of motorists as we approach intersections. Perhaps a coincidence again, but Eugene has lost 37% of its cycling community back to cars since 2009, at least according to the ACS. Perhaps I'm not alone in not being a fan of these newfangled implementations. Hopefully, when you look back at this thread in a few years, we'll find that people have started to populate these things and my concerns about their drawbacks were unwarranted. I certainly don't mind it when my negative observations prove to not support a gloomy outlook.

buzzman

Where I was in 60's and 70's? Well, yeah, I came in on that tide of ridership you mention. I was in Rhode Island and the youngest member of a small cadre of cyclists that resurrected an old cycling club called the Narragansett Bay Wheelmen, which has since grown into one of the largest, most active clubs in the US. I was also racing successfully through the 1970's, working in bike shops and touring- all over New England and Eastern Canada and then across the US twice and Canada once. I've ridden the West Coast from Vancouver to San Diego and the east coast from Viriginia to Maine. And in the 60's and 70's, pre-bike lane, pre most bike paths I was an assertive aggressive rider on the road because it was the only way to get around. I was spat on, had bottles and trash thrown at me, run off the road countless times, right hooked, left hooked, almost doored more times than I care to count and arrested for riding on prohibited highways.

In the 80's I moved to Boston, a city known for it's M******* drivers and, at that time, there was a dearth of cycling infrastructure- in fact, it was strongly, vehemently and aggressively opposed by many of the guys I'd raced and done club rides with. There was an active group of utility cyclists made up of a more diverse set of cyclists, many of them women, who were advocating for lanes and paths like the Netherlands. They were shouted down and, as I look back, it was an abhorrent display of sexism. I watched as these guys "mansplained" and shut down the voices of these female cyclists and the laid back " hippie" type male riders that were their allies. Eventually I found myself more and more sympathetic to the voices of these cyclists calling for infrastructure despite the fact that I felt no particular need for it at that time.

In the late 80's I started living and working in NYC and was astounded at how a city that to me seemed ideal for cycling due to its size, it's lack of hills and the challenges of getting around by car had so few cyclists. When I started riding there I understood why. Boston's narrow twisting old cow paths kept traffic speeds lower and more manageable but NYC had straight avenues and streets and cars and taxis took advantage of these straightaways gunning it to speeds close 50-60 mph between lights whenever possible. When the roads were congested they would literally nudge you with their cars to get by you. It felt like war. It was a war I willingly engaged in. But when infrastructure started to come to Cambridge, MA, then NYC, then Boston I started to get it. And yeah, there's bad infrastructure but if you've spent most of your time in Portland and Davis, CA you've been pampered compared to the rest of us and me thinks you, and some others, often doth protest too much.

Over time my appreciation for the positive voices of change, like those early advocates of bike lanes in the 70's that were so shamefully silenced, has only increased while my tolerance of the cynical, negative, naysaying of the "all knowing" skeptic has been worn to nil. So pardon me if I find delight in scanning through old threads to see how wrong people were when they discreditied certain bike infrastructures or things like bike share.

Groucho Marx was right, "Time wounds all heels."

hooCycles

We recently got a bikeshare-type system at my university, and in 1.5 semesters, I've probably seen a dozen people using the bikes. I think that it is a combination of having a relatively compact campus, the fact that you actually have to pay for it (college kids don't think you should pay for anything), and that the bikes look really stupid. How many of you all would get into cycling if you were limited to a terminally ergonomic quad-killer? I don't think I would use it if I didn't have my own steed.