Streetsblog Los Angeles

We’ve noted before that it can be challenging to figure out exactly how much driving is avoided when someone rides a bike. But here we have it straight from the horse’s mouth – nearly 7,000 horses, in fact. According to a November 2012 survey of Capital Bikeshare members, released today, the average subscriber drove 198 miles less per year after joining the system. Multiply that by 22,200 members and that’s 3.7 million pounds of CO2 that won’t get belched into the atmosphere. Nice work, CaBistas!

Some other takeaways from the member survey:

Capital Bikeshare both enhances access to transit and shifts trips away from transit. Almost a quarter of CaBi users had used bike-share to get to the bus in the past month, and 17 percent had used it six or more times to access the metro system. At the same time, transit is the mode most likely to get replaced with bike-share trips: 61 percent of respondents say they ride Metrorail less often and 52 percent ride a bus less often. On the plus side, though, 50 percent drive less often.

For any given trip, if bike-share hadn’t been available, 44 percent would have taken a bus or train, 38 percent would have walked, 5 percent would have ridden their own bike, and 4 percent would have driven.

Bike-share members drive less. According to the survey report, “a quarter (26 percent) reduced their driving miles since joining Capital Bikeshare; 11 percent reduced driving by more than 1,000 miles. Two-thirds (65 percent) of respondents who reported their mileage made no change in driving miles; only 9 percent increased their driving miles.” CaBi members were never big drivers, but they reported driving an average 1,805 miles per year before joining Capital Bikeshare and 1,607 miles per year since joining, “for a reduction of about 198 miles annually” per person – or a cumulative 4.4 million miles.

Of the 4.4 million miles not driven… more than half are commuting miles, which often occur at peak hours. That’s a significant amount of car traffic taken off Washington’s streets by these snazzy red bikes. In total, 58 percent of members use it to go to and from work, and 40 percent commute via bike-share “often.” All together, about half of bike-share trips are work-related.

CaBi saves members money. An average of $15.39 per week, in fact – or about $800 annually, per person.

Read more…

The team at BikeShare.com took a trip to Anaheim last week to look at the work completed on the first installment of Bike Nation’s Anaheim system. The above video goes into the pros and cons of Bike Nation’s design and of bicycling in Anaheim, but overall the review is pretty positive. As Matt Christensen writes on BikeShare.com:

Our journey taught us two things: First, Anaheim is not bike-friendly and, second, Bike Nation Anaheim is in its beta stage. Despite the nascence of the program and its auto-centric setting, we found the system’s components to be relatively easy to use and comfortable.

Which is not to say the review was universally positive. For example, many of the bicycles they tried were stuck in second gear and the kiosks weren’t large enough to fit all of the bicycles at their destination. But overall, they found the system easy to use and the bicycles comfortable to ride.

For more, check out the video above. Bike Nation is working on expanding the bike share system in Anaheim from 3 to 10 locations and creating systems in Tustin, Long Beach and Los Angeles.

In just under an hour, Bike Nation will publicly announce the nine locations for kiosks in its initial rollout of what is promised to be a massive bike share system for Los Angeles. Last April, Bike Nation promised a 400 kiosk, 4,000 bike bike share system to be installed in Downtown Los Angeles, Westwood, Venice and Hollywood in the next several years. The bike share company promised to invest $16 million in its system. An independent estimate from one of their competitors estimates that they could earn $40 million in revenue in the next decade.

Apparently, they’re starting the rollout in Downtown Los Angeles. That makes sense, since 175 of the promised stations will be in Downtown Los Angeles. As shown above, the first nine kiosks are planned for:

• Union Station
• El Pueblo/Olvera Street
• Caltrans Building (2)
• City Hall (2)
• County Hall of Administration Building
• LAPD (2)

“We are excited to put stations on the ground in Downtown Los Angeles and begin the process of rolling out our bike share program and providing a safe, low-cost, healthy transportation alternative to Los Angeles residents,” writes Derek Fretheim, Bike Nation Chief Operating Officer. “The Company has already begun its site planning in anticipation of the City Council Motion and created a sample permit package consisting of initial station locations.”

Rather than go through a standard “Request for Proposal” process as has been done with the other large bike share systems in America, Bike Nation gave Los Angeles another option. Bike Nation approached the mayor’s office with a simple proposal, if Los Angeles creates a permitting system to operate private bike share on public property, then Bike Nation would invest in creating a private bike share system. Read more…

It’s been a big week for Bike Nation. While most media will note their plans to bring 2,500 bikes to the City of Long Beach for another Southern California bike share program, a smaller project is going to get big attention in the Los Angeles bicycle community.

Yesterday, Bike Nation announced that registered users can submit locations to them through an online mapping program for bike sharing kiosks in Downtown Los Angeles. Earlier this year, Bike Nation announced plans to bring 4,000 bikes to a bike share program in Los Angeles focusing on Downtown, Hollywood, Westwood and Venice Beach. The Downtown is expected to be the first community to see the kiosks, hopefully by the end of this year.

But where will the bike kiosks go? Bike Nation has been mum on details, but has announced that they will be on both public and private land. The new “suggest a station” web map gives anyone a chance to tell Bike Nation where the kiosks ought to go or give a thumbs up or down to the ones already suggested.

“We understand that the success of a bike share program is based on providing affordable and, most importantly, accessible kiosks located within close proximity to areas of community-interest,” writes Bike Nation Chief Operating Officer Derek Fretheim. ”This online campaign provides a voice to the community and is something we will certainly take into account as we determine the best kiosk locations in our network.”

Directions on how to use the website, provided by Bike Nation, are after the jump. Read more…

Created with flickr slideshow.This Saturday, Bike Nation launched Southern California’s first bike share system in Anaheim. While no Streetsblog writer managed to attend, we’ll make it a little later this week to try out the bikes, kiosks and registration without Bike Nation staff there to help us out.  But one of our intrepid readers, Erik Griswold, did make the trip.  He reports that the opening was “sparesly attended,” at least when he was there at 11 a.m. Regardless of the size, Bike Nation is open in Anaheim.

His pictures are featured in the above slide show.

For more on the opening, check out the story on NBC 4.

Last night, the Anaheim City Council approved the first 8 kiosk locations for its bike share system, which will be owned and operated by Bike Nation.  Bike Nation announced at April’s CicLAvia that it would bring 4000 bicycles and 400 kiosks to Los Angeles starting in December of this year.

Angelenos critical of Bike Nation have pointed out that the company hasn’t operated a bike share system yet, so the opening of the first portion of their system in Anaheim is sure to be closely monitored by L.A.’s bike advocates.   As outlined on Streetsblog, the City of Los Angeles is developing a permitting system to allow private operators to place bike share kiosks on open streets.  While the permit process is not completed, it is unlikely the Los Angeles City Council will weigh in on kiosk location through a formal committee hearing and voting process.

Bike Nation provided a copy of the presentation given at last night’s City Council meeting showing the locations and station layout for each of the eight kiosks.  The presentation can be downloaded or viewed by clicking here.  A map of the locations, with some basic details, is included below. Bike Nation hopes to have the kiosks installed by the weekend of July 21. The kiosks and bicycles are part of a one year pilot program between the City of Anaheim and Bike Nation.

View Bike Nation Kiosk Locations as presented to Anaheim City Council, 7/10/2012 in a larger map

Read more…

On the morning of April 15th, Mayor Villaraigosa walked up to the press conference kicking off CicLAvia and announced that Bike Nation, a new bike share company, would invest $16 million in creating a bike share program for Los Angeles.  Bike Nation would bring 4,000 bikes, 400 kiosks to communities in Downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, Westwood and Venice Beach.  Of that $16 million, 70% is for capital (kiosks, bikes, etc…) and 30% is for bike share operations.

The announcement caught nearly everyone off guard.  Outside of a small group of CicLAvia Board Members and media members the city had kept a tight lid on the announcement.

While the secrecy helped make a big splash at L.A.’s biggest Livable Streets event, it also led to confusion and criticism from some quarters that one would expect to be sympathetic.  Rumors swirled, including one that Bike Nation was an AEG front group (it’s not).  Others attacked Bike Nation for exaggerating the uniqueness of their patented chain free bicycles or for biting off more than they can chew by promising the nation’s second largest bike share program.

Further complicating things, Bike Nation’s relationship with Los Angeles is different than the model used in most cities.

In the year before Bike Nation announced it was coming to Los Angeles, Metro was working with a handful of bike share vendors to bring bike sharing to Los Angeles County including Bike Nation, B-Cycles and Alta Bike Share, a partner with Alta Planning and Design.  At the time, many assumed that when bike share did come to Los Angeles, it would be a subsidized program similar to the ones in Washington D.C. and the one coming to New York this year.  When a bike share program is subsidized, a formal Request for Proposals (RFP) is released where vendors compete for the contract and funding.  Their proposals show where they will place bikes, how many they can place in certain locations and what the other revenue streams to support the system are.

But Bike Nation’s business model doesn’t require a subsidization which frees them from some of the commitments required by an RFP.  Between what it charges users, and what it will sell in advertising, Bike Nation expects to make a large profit over the next decade in Los Angeles.  A rival company estimated that the advertising that could come from a functioning bike share system with 4,000 bikes could be $40 million over the next decade or 250% of Bike Nation’s initial investment.

As Lisa Sarno, with the Mayor’s office put it, Bike Nation’s offer “Allowed the city to leverage and speed up the process for bike share.”

Seeing the opportunity, Bike Nation came to the city of Los Angeles not with a proposal but with a request.  “Create a system to permit bike share installation and we’ll make the investment to make that system work.”  Bike Nation has repeatedly said it didn’t have an exclusive deal with the city, and they’re right.  They have a commitment to apply for permits to put in kiosks and bikes.  In this way, Bike Nation skipped the RFP and went straight to permitting and soon thereafter installation.

“To date, bike sharing systems have been reliant on government funding and ongoing operational subsidies,” explains Derek Fretheim, the Chief Operating Officer for Bike Nation.  “We saw a way to create a bike share program without using those subsidies and began promoting a private venture strategy earlier this year.”

City staff believe they can have the permitting system created by the fall so installation can begin before the end of the year.  “Quite frankly, this is the first time we’ve done this in the City of Los Angeles,” Sarno says of creating the bike share permitting process.

Such an arrangement has one obvious benefit for the city: it will have a bike share system it couldn’t afford to pay for.  But there are drawbacks.  If one considers bike sharing as a form of public transit, a system where the local government has less say on placement, upkeep, bicycle conditions and other safety issues is just that: a system where the government has less say on placement, upkeep, bicycle conditions and other safety issues.  Read more…

For your viewing, here’s the animation produced by Transport for London explaining how to use Barclays Cycle Hire — the 570-station bike-share system that launched about two years ago. There’s a lot to cover in a little more than four minutes: when bike-share is useful, how to get a membership, what not to do with your bike, how to handle a bike that needs repair, and so forth.

In Los Angeles, we’ve already seen criticism of Bike Nation and their commitment to bringing a large, city-wide bike share system online. We could probably use a video like this before Bike Nation launches in December.

(Note: Ben did all the research and most of the writing. Damien changed the story so it was an easier fit in Los Angeles.)

Last week, we asked you to write questions for Navin Narang, an executive with First Pacific Holdings, the company that owns Bike Nation.  Bike Nation is the company that will bring 4,000 bikes and 400 kiosks for Los Angeles’ first official bike sharing system over the next eighteen months.  Barring any changes, L.A.’s collaboration with Bike Nation will be the second largest bike share system in the country, trailing only the mammoth system coming to New York this year.

Streetsblog readers asked some complicated questions and a couple of members of the Bike Nation team helped draft the answers.  So with a thank you to Jeff Pomeroy, Ethan Fiamingo, Navin Narang, Brad Barlow, and Derek Fretheim, we present Bike Nation’s answers to your questionnaire.

1.Will Bike Nation make real-time system data available to the public and developers as Alta Bicycle Share has done in the markets they serve?  This enables third-party applications that enhance user experience.  It also has created a high quality dataset available for bicycle planning in those cities. 

Bike Nation is the only bike sharing system in the world that uses Active Real Time GPS on our Bikes and Kiosks, which allows the user to get real-time live information on multiple devices and on their member profile online. Bike Nation will be open to data sharing as long as the applications being developed by outside entities don’t duplicate Bike Nation’s efforts, confuse the general public or breach confidential Membership information.

2. Existing bike share applications have found lower than expected use among college students and lower income individuals. Will Bike Nation work with Universities to subsidize memberships for students, and with community foundations and organizations to subsidize or administer outreach programs to lower income individuals? Is there other plans to work with universities to make certain locations are available for students to utilize bike share on campus? 

Along with providing discounted student rates, we are currently working with several of the larger Universities in Southern California to implement a Bike Sharing system on campuses that connects with the public system, which would be subsidized through the Universities. We are also working with Multiple Transit Authorities in Southern California to tie into their low-income programs, allowing the same types of benefits currently extended to them by the Transit Authority on other public transit on our Bike Sharing Program. Read more…

The Department of Transportation is currently going around to community boards and presenting preliminary maps of bike-share locations. While the map for the full service area isn’t finished yet, the details that have come out so far are pretty exciting.

One of the big questions we had about station siting concerned the bike-transit connection. Namely, how is our bike share system going to handle New York City’s biggest commuter hubs: Penn Station, Grand Central and the Port Authority Bus Terminal? Based on the preliminary presentation made to Manhattan Community Board 4 this week, the answer is that bike-share is going big.

At Penn Station and Port Authority, rather than build a single station big enough to meet the enormous demand, DOT and Alta Bicycle Share have decided to build three stations at each location, with around 50 or 60 docks at each. At Port Authority, the plan is for a total of 140 docks, according to CB 4 transportation committee co-chair Christine Berthet. At Penn Station, there will be 180 docks.

For a little perspective, Capital Bikeshare, currently the nation’s largest bike-share system, only has 23 docks in front of Washington D.C.’s Union Station, with the same number at a station a couple of blocks away. Boston’s North and South Stations only have a single nearby Hubway station each, with about 45 docks at both locations.

In other words, the most important sites in New York City’s bike-share system are, fittingly, super-sized. With the biggest transit system in the country, it’s only appropriate to give those riders the biggest bike-share stations for the last mile of their trip.

Read more…