Streetsblog Los Angeles

Coming soon to a street near you? B-Cycle (pictured), Bixi and Bike Nation present in front of Metro headquarters. Photo: Dave Sotero/Metro

Will Los Angeles County have an integrated bike share system in the next five years?  Metro is taking the first steps to become a coordinator for bike share efforts already underway so that L.A. County could have one integrated bike share program instead of many local bike share systems.

Earlier today, Metro’s Planning and Programming Committee approved a bike share strategy for the agency that would create a mechanism for municipalities and cities to work together and create a county-wide bike share plan.   Metro’s bike share strategy needs to be approved by the full board before it becomes policy.

Cities that have bike share programs funded and on the way, such as Santa Monica, and that are hopeful to bring bike share at some date in the future, such as South Pasadena, attended the hearing to voice support for the motion.

Before the hearing, B-Cycle, Bixi, and Bike Nation put on a demonstration of what bike share is and how it works.  Through a bike share program, people can rent bikes at a docking station and ride it to another station located somewhere else.  Systems can be publicly or privately owned and sometimes require renters to be members of the bike share program.

Bike sharing systems have been installed in many of the most progressive cities around the country.  Modeled after Velib in Paris, France Washington D.C. is widely credited for having the first bike share program in America.  New York City will launch a large bike share program of its own later this year including a GPS program that will be used to inform transportation planning decisions. Read more…

(Streetsblog has no formal position on Occupy L.A., but we do find the role of bikes and a bike share program in this local branch of the national phenomenon very interesting. To that end, we have partnered with our old friend Roadblock to provide coverage of how the program is going and what if any lessons were learned.  As part of this partnership, we can work with donors to provide a small tax deduction for any donations to Roadblock’s bike share program- DN)

I’m proud to have set up the first known bike share program in the city of Los Angeles and thankfully welcome Streetsblog as the non-profit conduit for donations to this program. With this generous arrangement, the bike share program will be entering a new phase of usefulness and service to the community.

I put my bike where my mouth is. - DN

I set up the OccupyLA bike share with the intention of bringing the active transportation message to the occupiers themselves as I believe that we need to be the change we want to see in the world. If Occupy LA is to achieve some of the most important goals of the movement, people are going to have to learn to reduce their oil dependency – the very addiction that keeps our country involved in endless foreign wars. The taxpayers of the United States of America have spent trillions of dollars to bomb broke people on the other side of the earth for “cheap gas.” It stops with us.

I would like to thank Alex De Cordoba, Mikey Wally, Joseph Bray-Ali, Cat Campion and Damien Newton for their kind and important donations thus far. I would like to thank the Bikescum collective for maintaining the bike share program thus far. Read more…

Goodbye old friend...you'll be well loved by Occupy L.A. Yes, that's the same bike we used to teach Bill Rosendahl the basics of bike safety.

“They poison our air, water, land, bodies, mind and dreams,” reads the sign held by a member of Occupy L.A. as thousands of bicycles shoot past. Many of the riders ring their bell, pump a fist, or stop to engage the protester as he stands in the streets and sidewalk in front of City Hall during last Sunday’s CicLAvia.

Across the street, the iconic Roadblock is hanging out at the Bikeside Speaks stage chatting with many of the bike advocates who are stopping by to listen to the speakers, chat with friends or wish Stephen and Enci Box well on their upcoming adventure.

“Natural fit, a natural fit,” Roadblock says of the convergence of CicLAvia, the largest car-free party in North America, and the Occupy movement. Roadblock has been involved with the local cycling movement as the face of Midnight Ridazz and has been a fixture at City Hall as part of the Occupy Movement.

Roadblock is combining his connections in the bike community with the needs of Occupy L.A. In a couple of years when the City of Los Angeles or Metro triumphantly announce that they’re bringing L.A. its “first bike share,” remember that Occupy L.A. had one first. Last night, I dropped in on Occupy L.A. with a pair of beach cruisers that have been collecting dust in our bike storage area the last couple of years.

While Roadblock was busy at a meeting last night, he directed me to “the big yellow tent” that serves as the Bike District for Occupy L.A. There, a group of twenty-somethings were wrenching on a bike. The group, which included a Bicycle Kitchen Cook, has been repairing and maintaining bikes for free to any Occupier that asked for help. To identify the bikes that will be part of the Occupy L.A. Bike Share, the team is painting the donated bikes gold. Read more…

Conservative Congressional leaders have had bicycle and pedestrian projects in their cross hairs for years. This has led to some serious policy concerns, such as a Republican Bill to reauthorize the transportation trust fund that has no bicycle or pedestrian funds.  And less serious ones, such as online polls designed to create populist anger against green transportation spending.

Cantor's reasons wanting cuts to bike share.

Just last year, Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor proposed eliminating the federal Safe Routes to Schools programs in his YouCut program, where people vote on their least favorite projects on a special website.  While Safe Routes to Schools didn’t “win” that election, Cantor is now proposing to eliminate federal bike share subsidies.

Even if the federal government eliminated funding for bicycle and pedestrian programs altogether, it wouldn’t do much of anything to reduce the federal deficit.  Note in Cantor’s proposal there are hard figures for savings if the grants to Worstel Wool Manufacturers or a scholarship and research program to promote green technologies were eliminated.  That’s because there’s no line item in the federal government for “bike share” programs, which is probably why bicycle and pedestrian projects are blamed for the bankruptcy of the federal transportation trust fund.  Read more…

The bike share program at Emory University asks the key question.

In September of 2008, Los Angeles was beginning to move towards creating a bike share system for Los Angeles.  It was a hot topic at the time after then City-Council Transportation Committee Chair and now Comptroller/Mayoral Candidate Wendy Greuel championed the idea after experiencing a successful temporary bike share program at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

There was only one problem…nobody else thought Los Angeles was ready for a bike share program.  Some thought that biking in L.A. was just too dangerous to encourage novice cyclists to rent a bicycle.  Others just thought there were more pressing infrastructure needs at the moment.  When I say nobody thought it was a good idea, I’m including leaders with the LACBC, Councilman Tom LaBonge, and even the LADOT (and especially the majority of Streetsblog readers in 2008.)

The LADOT simply wrote:

…the City still lacks a continuous network to accommodate bicycle use for the bike sharing program.

And that wast that.  Bike share has more than caught on nationally, just check out the roster of recent films at Streetfilms, but it hasn’t been a major issue here in the Southland outside of an occasional reference in a report or government document.

Until last week. Read more…

Villaraigosa re-emerges as a leader on bus issues. Photo: Los Angeles Times

This morning, Mayor Villaraigosa’s last term as Chair of the Metro Board of Directors got off to an efficient and relatively controversy-free start as Supervisors passed motions on studying the impacts of Metro’s bus cuts and Bus Rapid Transit expansion, a second study on the costs and benefits of a bike share program, the approval of a green construction program and even a preferred route for California High Speed Rail.  The only real debate among the Board Members came when Director Diane DuBois challenged Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas on the definition of “local” in the local jobs program and on whether or not to give free Metro passes to uniformed Girl Scouts during the group’s 100th birthday party.

Here’s a quick roundup of the major happenings.

Review of bus service and Bus Rapid Transit Opportunities – Nobody can accuse Mayor Villaraigosa of thinking small.  The new Board Chair introduced a motion to examine the impacts of the hundreds of thousands of hours bus service cuts that have occurred since the expiration of the Consent Decree between the agency and Bus Riders Union in 2007.

“We see this as a tremendous opportunity to reverse some of the damage that has been done in South L.A.,” testified the Bus Riders Union’s Sunyoung Yang.

To secure unanimous passage, Mayoral Appointee to the Board Richard Katz clarified that this motion “doesn’t undo anything that this Board has already done.”  When questioned directly, Metro CEO Art Leahy confirmed with this interpretation.

A second part of the motion called on staff to examine the possibilities to expand the agency’s Bus Rapid Transit program.  Yang confirmed the BRU’s support for this strategy, “We should continue building on the victories and the massive breakthrough we had on the Wilshire Bus Only Lanes.”

Also testifying in favor of the motion were other BRU members, the Sierra Club Transportation Committee, and Kymberleigh Richards of the San Fernando Valley Service Council.  The LA Times had more on the Mayor’s bus plans in this morning’s paper.

Green Construction Program – Even critics of Metro have to concede the agency has become a leader in promoting green transportation.  Metro was the first big-city transit agency in the country to have an entirely natural gas bus fleet, and they’re beginning to move towards a zero-emissions fleet.  Today, they finalized a “green construction policy” for Metro projects.

Support for the policy was near universal with the Clean Air Coalition, NRDC, Sierra Club, Bus Riders Union, and East Yard Community Groups for Environmental Policy all voicing support.  No construction or contracting groups expressed opposition.  In fact, the only complaint about the program was that it doesn’t apply to LADOT or Caltrans projects.  The policy passed unanimously.

Basically, the new policy is just what it says it is.  Metro contractors now have to use construction equipment, vehicles, and generators that meet modern clean air standards.  This will improve health for residents and construction crews by requiring equipment that emits significantly less air pollution than older models.  Contractors can meet either retrofit old equipment or purchase new equipment.  The NRDC Switchboard has more details on the program.

Bikes and light rail and high speed rail, all after the jump. Read more…

Anyone who claims that bike-sharing is a European-style transportation innovation has clearly never set foot in Hangzhou, China. The 50,000-bike system in this southern China city of almost 7 million people (about 1.5 million people fewer than New York City) blows all other bike-shares off the map. As Bradley Schroeder of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy said, “I don’t think there is anywhere you can stand in Hangzhou for more than a minute or two where you wouldn’t have a Hangzhou Public Bike go past you.”

Hangzhou’s 2,050 bike-share stations are spaced less than a thousand feet from each other in the city center, and on an average day riders make 240,000 trips using the system. Its popularity and success have set a new standard for bike-sharing in Asia. And the city is far from finished. The Hangzhou Bicycle Company plans to expand the bike-share system to 175,000 bikes by 2020.

BikeTalk this Saturday featured an extended discussion about the technicalities, challenges, and beauties of a bike share programs. On the show we had Phil Brock, Santa Monica Parks and Rec commissioner, Ryan Rzepecki from with Social Bike, who are developing the intelligent locking system which can operate independently of return stations, Todd Loewenstein, Co-owner of Baiku Bikes, who will roll out a few stations in Manhattan Beach soon. Todd shared a lot of insight into the economics of these systems proposed a system of 12 criteria for a successful system. Also participating was Michael Cahn from Sustainable Streets, who raised some questions about the costs and specific benefits of these systems, and Andrea White from Long Beach Bike Station.

Despite some well publicized problems, Paris' Velib remains the most famous bike share program in the world. Photo:24 Oranges/flickr

Bike share programs are “really cool”, but looking closer you soon understand that they are also really complex and tricky. The trip structure needs to be right, the roll out density is crucial, maintenance, making sure that the bikes are evenly distributed, the relationship between number of bikes and number of return stations, etc. A poorly designed and underutilized program can end up with a cost for each trip which would be higher than a taxi ride.

The early data is in on one of the country’s pioneering bike-sharing systems, and it brings some encouraging news.

Minneapolis’s Nice Ride, which launched this summer, topped 100,000 trips in its first five months. Crash rates and vandalism were very low. Perhaps most interesting was the effect on driving, reports The Bike-Sharing Blog. Nice Ride surveyed 680 users and found that nearly 20 percent used the system instead of driving:

Attendees of a designers' conference take a spin on Minneapolis's bike-sharing system, Nice Ride. Photo: UCDA Design Conference

That’s outstanding and is quite higher than other cities’ mode shift percentages from bike-sharing, which includes Lyon, France with only about 4% shifting away from driving, according to the NICHES publication on bike-sharing. Not too shabby.

Regarding theft and vandalism, it’s clear that Minnesotans and Minneapolis’ visitors are honest and good riders and drivers. There were only two bikes lost and three incidents of vandalism causing damage greater than $100. Take THAT, Paris with its horrendous theft and vandalism record! (I’m only kidding, j’aime Paris.) Also, there were no reports of injury and only one reported crash.

As we’ve reported before, American bike-sharing systems are trailing their European counterparts in station density and overall ridership. Many European cities have made more substantial commitments to expansive programs.

But the promising numbers coming out of Minneapolis could help provide the basis for the future expansion of bike sharing in the U.S.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Burning the Midnight Oil asks whether the imperiled passenger rail systems in Ohio and Wisconsin could be self-supporting or even profitable. Bike Portland looks to Europe for inspiration on reducing distracted driving. And Sprawled Out reports on a survey of East Coast developers who reported that Smart Growth is the new “safe bet” financially.

A website developed by Oliver O'Brien maps bike-share systems in real time. London's full bike-share stations are represented here by red dots and empty stations by blue dots.

A fantastic new visualization of 16 bike-share systems around the world lets you see how people are using public bikes from London to Melbourne. You can watch animated graphics, for example, of bikes getting picked up in one part of town and dropped off in another during rush hour. The site, created by Oliver O’Brien, a researcher at University College London, also lets you compare bike-share usage from city to city.

While a few American cities have made big strides in bike-sharing this year, with Denver, Minneapolis, and Washington D.C. all committing to systems with 500 or more bikes, O’Brien’s site indicates that people aren’t using them very much. These systems occupy a middle ground between totally impractical pilot projects and the more robust bike-share networks that have recently sprouted in major European and Asian cities. For bike-sharing to take off here, improvements like increased station density, better bike infrastructure, and interoperability with transit systems will probably be necessary.

In cities with large-scale systems and densely clustered stations, huge numbers of people get around on shared bikes. For example, as of 1:30 p.m. yesterday afternoon (Eastern Standard Time), 1,342 bikes were checked out from Barcelona’s Bicing system. At the day’s peak point, 2,425 Bicing bikes were in use all at once, out of a total of around 5,000.

In contrast, D.C.’s new Capital Bikeshare program had only 23 bikes out at 1:30, with 50 in use at the day’s peak. Nice Ride in Minneapolis had only five bikes in use, with a high for the day of 26. The two systems had a total of 648 and 588 shared bikes at all of their stations, respectively. Over the course of the day, that adds up to fairly marginal ridership. Denver’s usage rates, too, were quite low.

So what’s standing in the way of American bike-share success? One factor offered by bike-sharing consultant Paul DeMaio is that Americans need some time to get used to bike-sharing. D.C.’s system is just a month old today, he noted, and not even fully built out, while Denver’s opened in the spring and Minneapolis’s in the summer. That said, London’s Barclays Cycle Hire system launched at the end of July, but yesterday had a high of 815 bikes in use at once, according to O’Brien’s site.

“Enough cannot be said about scale,” said Michael Kodransky, a research associate with the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. “Station density is key.”

Read more…