Portland’s new Biketown bikeshare proving popular and easy to use

The brand-new Biketown system in Portland, Ore., is already taking off, and a tour of its offerings shows a unique system that improves the transportation options of locals and visitors alike.

It’s great for transportation geeks because it automatically provides detailed data about one’s rides. It’s great for those who want to sightsee because stations are already plentiful. And it’s great for those new to bicycling because it’s designed to be safe and simple.

Sure, there are still a few hiccups in the 1,000-bike system, which opened two weeks ago. But several rides I took recently throughout the downtown and across the bridges of the Willamette River while visiting for the Association of Commuter Transportation annual conference proved to reinforce Portland’s status as a top bicycling city in the U.S.

Generally speaking, Portland’s drivers proved less aggressive than back home in Washington, D.C. (not that they’re especially bad in the District’s urban core, where many have learned to share the road as bicycles became a more regular sight in recent years).

Of course, with Biketown’s blaring orange paint job, it would be pretty impossible for a motorist to not see one. Another benefit of the color is that it’s easy to find a neon orange station as riders look to park their bikes.

What differentiates Portland’s system from bikeshare in similarly-sized cities is that it follows a “smart-bike” model, rather than a “smart-dock” one, meaning the technology to check out bikes, log rides, and display information is all attached to the bike’s rear fender. Previously, smaller cities and campuses (see: College Park, Md.) have opted for smart-bikes, while larger urban areas (Seattle, Boston, New York, D.C.) have installed smart-dock systems.

Signing up is easy, but requires a tiny bit of forethought: I filled out a form online in about two minutes and reserved a bike down the street. To unlock it, I just punched in my membership number and PIN in the on-bike electronic system and was off on my way.

A rare hiccup: a rider forgot to take their U-lock while biking.

On the hiccup side was that a fair number of bikes were in repair mode and unavailable for use, although the easy digital readout on the back of the bike made it clear that this was the case. I also used a bike in which the seat kept falling down and a few I used had glitch-y gears, which could be the result of the bikes having eight speeds, unlike Capital Bikeshare’s three. As a first-time user, I didn’t initially realize that I could self-report repairs at the end of my rides, and clearly many other users are also not yet aware of this feature.

The price is certainly right and is competitive with other forms of transit. The $2.50, 30-minute single ride or $12 day pass options (which can, important to know, only be used for a total of three hours over a 24-hour period) gives tourists some nice options, while locals can buy annual passes for $12 a month. Annual passes provide users with 90 minutes of ride time across unlimited trips, each day.

Biketown opened July 19, and “ridership so far is stronger than expected,” according to Dani Simons, director of communications & external affairs for Motivate, the system’s operator.

Ryan Rzepecki – founder of Social Bicycles, who provided the technology and design behind the system’s smart-bikes – noted during the Mobility Lab-sponsored Transportation Techies special Portland edition that there have been 28,351 total trips in Biketown’s first two weeks, an average of about 2,000 trips per day.

After my personal test runs (left) of the Biketown system, I reached out to Simons with a few lingering questions:

Mobility Lab: Looking beyond these first couple of weeks, what will be considered success for Biketown?

Simons: Success will be continued strong ridership and also getting folks who have never tried biking, or have never tried it beyond recreational biking, to give it a whirl.

What do you think was the secret to getting the city and Nike to embrace just doing it, meaning putting the system in?

The City of Portland has wanted a bikeshare system for some time now. But they wanted to get it right. Patience means they get a system where the taxpayers bear no ongoing risk for operations and one with a proven operator in Motivate, and a world-class partner in Nike.

What are the top keys to getting people to use the system?

First, good station planning (making sure stations are in locations where people want and/or need to go). Second, a few different membership types that meet a variety of needs (including a single-ride pass that encourages new people to try bikeshare on the spur-of-the-moment), and lastly, providing great service.

Is there anything exciting or unique about Biketown’s marketing and communications strategy to get people to try riding?

Right now we’re focused on building a brand that is fun, easy, accessible, and authentically Portland. I think the Biketown Instagram feed is a great example of that. Also, across all Motivate-operated systems, we’re focused on building strong member communications that welcome, educate, and engage members, to encourage folks to make the most of their memberships, and we hope, over time, renew.

With GPS on each bike, it shouldn’t be long before we see some detailed looks at exactly how Biketown is taking off in Portland. While some questions remain to be seen (will monetary rebalancing incentives ease the cost of moving bikes around?), it seems poised to become a key element of Portland’s already-famous bike infrastructure.

Photos: Top, a Biketown hub in the Pearl District (Adam Russell). Middle, an abandoned U-lock at a hub in downtown Portland (Adam Russell). Bottom, the author at Willamette riverside.

This article originally appeared on Mobility Lab.

Bicycling in Cleveland is Easy, Fun, and Something Everyone Should Try

What do General Motors, Samsung, and Duke and Ohio State universities all have in common?

They have each launched bikeshare systems in the past year brought to them by Zagster, a private, venture-funded startup that launched as CityRyde back in 2007 in Philadelphia.

Visiting Cleveland, Ohio this week for the Content Marketing World conference, I got my first taste of Zagster, which opened last summer in the city. I knew nothing about this company or that Cleveland had a bikesharing network. I simply stumbled upon a small stand of white bikes as I wandered around the city’s Warehouse District to the west of downtown, where my hotel and the conference are happening.

It couldn’t have been easier to download the app and sign up for Zagster on my phone. I didn’t even know if there were any other stations than the one I had seen, but it seemed worth the minor effort.

(I had planned to rent from The Bike Rack, which is also a very cool effort from the Downtown Cleveland Alliance. It welcomes downtown bicycling “with the convenience of secure bicycle parking and fulfilling everyday commuting needs with individual shower/changing facilities, lockers, bicycle rentals, and minor bicycle repairs.” And the rental prices are great at $5 per hour or $25 per day. But frankly, it is tough to compete with Zagster’s price of $3 an hour.)

Turns out there aren’t that many stations yet in Cleveland (according to the app, it looks like there are eight total). In fact, I didn’t see any other ones on my two-hour ride, but I wasn’t actively looking for them.

I wanted to know whether Cleveland is a bikeable city. And what I found, which is what I find everywhere, is that people should get over their irrational fears of this amazing form of travel. Cleveland is highly bikeable, even though it lacks much of any kind of truly progressive bike infrastructure.

The wind was in my hair. The sun was on my arms and face. The roads and sidewalks are ridiculously large through most of downtown, which makes riding feel spacious and extremely safe. (On the other hand, more importantly, the spaciousness makes the over-paved city ripe for the construction of protected bike lanes, sharrows, cycle tracks, and other bike infrastructure.)

In two hours on a bike, I saw a handful of sites it would take two days for others to explore. My route out of the Warehouse District took me through Tower City-Public Square east along Euclid Avenue through the Playhouse Square theater district and Cleveland State University’s campus, then back west through Erie Street Cemetary and around the baseball Indians’ Progressive Field and basketball Cavaliers’ Quicken Loans Arena.

The Bob Hope Memorial Bridge has wide bike and walk access and beautiful views of the city and Cuyahoga River below. After biking through the Tremont neighborhood, I had lunch at Town Hall, a very popular and tasty restaurant on West 25th Street near the West Side Market.

In Washington D.C., there are so many Capital Bikeshare stations that riders always quickly return the bikes to a station before having lunch or going to their meetings. But here, I simply opened my Zagster’s lockbox to get the key for the U-lock that comes with each rental. I locked the bike to a parking meter in front of Town Hall and ate my lunch.

I finished my ride by biking north on 25^th, which has the nicest bike lane (although not protected) that I witnessed anywhere in the city, and east across the Detroit-Superior Bridge back into the Warehouse District. Upon returning where I had started, there were only four bikes at the station. One had a bad flat tire and another was not locked.

Time will tell if Zagster will be a success in Cleveland. But there is no doubt that this system is about as easy as it gets for anyone to use. In the brave new world of on-demand-shared transportation, Cleveland and Zagster appear to be working out the kinks in what appears to be a major can’t-lose societal trend.

A Wiggle, Protected Lanes, and Bikeshare Bring Hope to San Francisco Bicycle Commuting

This article was originally published at Mobility Lab.

I got to explore San Francisco by bicycle over a couple of days during this month’s crucially educational Association for Commuter Transportation conference.

There’s no doubt the city is a leader at promoting bike riding. However, even in San Francisco, where dozens of riders pour down the protected bike lanes of Market Street every minute all day long, it is amazing that so much work remains to get Americans on board with doing something fun, healthy, efficient, and, yes, safe. (I mean, like, radically safe. So safe, in fact, that there has never been a death of anyone on a U.S. bikeshare bike.)

Start with the numbers: Commuter stats are a way to get a good read of a city’s bikability because if the streets are no good for urban bike commuting, then they’re probably not good for any other bike trips or for sightseeing bicycle tourists.

Portland’s bicycle commuters make up 6.3 percent of its population, based on 2011 numbers from the League of American Bicyclists. That’s as good as it gets in the U.S. and, frankly, it’s still pretty pathetic. San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, Washington D.C., and Madison hover somewhere in the 3 to 4 percent range. Anywhere besides those places and seeing a bicycle taking up a lane may be a little like seeing a UFO for drivers.

If you ask me, protected bike lanes are where it’s at for getting children and elderly people bicycling on city streets. Once there, much of the rest of the population might follow. And there are not nearly enough protected bike lanes in San Francisco.

That said, the protected bike lanes there are the best I’ve seen in the U.S. The medians installed to buffer cars and bike traffic in front of Twitter headquarters are even pretty. They have cactuses in them, and Heath Maddox, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s bikeshare program manager, told me the first time they planted the cacti, they were all stolen. Now they are anchor locked beneath the ground.

The Wiggle is another highlight of bicycling in San Francisco. It’s a mile’s worth of green street markings and signage that allows riders to get from Market Street up to the Panhandle Bikeway leading into Golden Gate Park without having to climb any of the city’s infamous hills. I didn’t see any similar guidance in other parts of the city, although more wiggles would be most welcome elsewhere, as well as in other hilly parts of other cities.

And perhaps most hopeful of all towards improving bike commute share is the nearly year-old Bay Area Bikeshare, which has 350 bikes and 35 stations in and around downtown San Francisco and 35 stations along the Caltrain corridor in other cities like Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose.

Introducing bikesharing to the city was a goal of former Mayor Gavin Newsom, and the SFMTA gave Maddox, a bicycle and pedestrian planner in the agency’s Livable Streets subdivision, the job of leading the effort. Taking some time out from our conference, several of us from Mobility Lab and partner organizations goDCgo, Arlington Transportation Partners, and Arlington County Commuter Services were lucky enough to get a personal tour of the city on BABS from Maddox.

Like Capital Bikeshare in D.C., the system is managed by Alta Bike Share and it is publicly funded, by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. Maddox is currently waiting to tabulate some of the first ridership survey data, but until then, we know that in San Francisco there are already about 3,000 members, and each of the 350 bikes average about three trips per day.

Maddox said there have not been that many complaints from riders, probably because there have been no major rebalancing issues. It’s relatively easy to keep the stations stocked since BABS is still confined to the areas north and south of Market Street and no further west than Van Ness Avenue.

Maddox said, “Mainly we just get questions about when we’re going to expand the system. We’ve reassessed that we can do things less densely. We can still do a little infill of adding stations in neighborhoods where stations already exist, but we’re planning to introduce bikeshare to new places earlier than we had originally planned. We hope to go next into the Casto and the Mission districts.”

He added that he hopes BABS can expand to about 3,000 more bikes in the future, although that would depend upon getting a big sponsorship of some kind and about $25 million.

Concerns that he noted to work on include:

• The overwhelming majority of bikeshare members are white, well-off males.
• San Francisco’s “very well-developed bike-rental industry is really concerned that bikeshare will hurt their businesses and they’re hyper involved.” But he cited Capital Bikeshare’s data showing that companies located near stations see an increase in business because of traffic from bikeshare riders, so he hopes those concerns can be alleviated. (I rented a bike overnight for $36 from Blazing Saddles on Mason Street near Union Square and there certainly appeared to be no shortage of customers.)
• Taxi drivers may be unhappy because about 50 percent of bikeshare trips appear to have been trips formerly taken by taxi. (So that leads me to think that the smart taxi drivers will mount bike racks on their vehicles.)

San Francisco is on the right course, promoting bicycling through protected lanes, The Wiggle, and Bay Area Bikeshare. These are all tools that will need to continue to be enhanced if the city has any realistic hopes of reaching its goal of 20 percent bike commuting by 2020, which was set in its 2009 Bicycle Plan and even harkens back somewhat to its 1973 “Transit First” policy, which noted that “travel by public transit, by bicycle, and on foot must be an attractive alternative to travel by private automobile.”

Take a Bikeshare Ride This Fourth of July, Let Freedom Ring

I took a bikeshare ride in Boston on Sunday and, with Americans feeling less free these days, it makes me sad to know that one solution that is so obvious and simple is sitting right in front of our eyes.

The one thing that struck me above all else as I wheeled along the cobbled streets of South Boston, comforting breeze in my hair, was how free I felt. I was able to take a two-and-a-half-hour tour on Hubway, Boston’s excellent bikeshare system, for a total of $6. In the old days, it would have easily cost $30 or so to take a bike tour of any city.

Before I left, I printed a map of sites to see on bikeable roads. I loaded the Hubway app on my iPhone, which I especially love because a compass arrow appears that points you to the nearest bikeshare station, of which there are plenty in Boston. And I took out five different bikes over 150 minutes in order to keep each bike rented for less than 30 minutes, thus avoiding any extra fees.

There is clearly no better way to experience a city, and in a way so equitably for all. You could barely see any sites in that timeframe riding in a car. And you wouldn’t see nearly as many if you walked.

Having never been to Boston before, it was heartening to see a city truly in love with bicycles. Lots of bike lanes. Hubway. Clearly tons of infrastructure geared to cyclists in Cambridge around Harvard University. Dozens and dozens of bikes parked at the Beacon Hill Whole Foods and various other bustling spots throughout the area.

The route I took would be ideal for any bicycle tourist. I started between Faneuil Hall and the Inner Harbor, went up through the North End Italian district, to the beautiful greenways along the Charles River, around Fenway Park, past the brownstones of South Boston on Rutland and Concorde squares and the SW Corridor Path, and ending near Boston Common.

Gratuitous photo of my baby daughter next to Larry Bird's shoes.

Nothing against the many Duck tours that circle through the city loaded with tourists, but there is something distinctly “unfree” about being stuck on those tours – fun as they may be, from a different perspective.

Yes, if there’s one thing Americans can do this Fourth of July to reclaim our freedom, it’s hop on a bike … or a bikeshare.