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Is NYC Bike Share Program Doomed, Or Is The Media Biased?
By
John Del Signore
Published Jun 6, 2011
Modified Jun 6, 2011
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By
John Del Signore
Published Jun 6, 2011
Modified Jun 6, 2011
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Over the weekend, the NY Times published an article casting doubt on the viability of the city's forthcoming bike share program, speculating, like the NY Post before it, that the system was doomed to fail. The article contends that community board members are worried about losing sidewalk space to bike-share kiosks, while one of the bike-share companies that's a finalist to run the project has "run into financial problems in Montreal." But the community board process hasn't even started yet, and the company cited in the article, Alta, is demanding a retraction.
"Alta Bicycle Share has no financial problems, and has no involvement in the Montreal bicycle share system," Alta's president wrote in a letter to the Times' editors. "In addition, as stated in the article, Public Bike System Company’s (provider of equipment to Alta) financial issues have been resolved." The Times article had reported, "Government officials [in Montreal] eventually provided $108 million in financing to Alta’s partner, Public Bike System Company, in part to cover losses incurred by Bixi, the city’s bike-share program."
Asked for his take on the takedown, Transportation Alternatives spokesman Michael Murphy tells us, "Looks like the usual suspects are getting an early start this time, picking at a program that doesn't even exist yet. Bike share will empower New Yorkers with more transit choice and help connect businesses to more paying customers. It's a shame that can't happen without the usual suspects trying to sow doubt and manufacture controversy with fact-free criticism. New Yorkers deserve better."
New York's other cycling advocacy group, Time's Up!, has been running a bike co-op for over five years with two locations: one in Williamsburg and one in Manhattan, on both sides of the Willamsburg Bridge. Time's Up! founder Bill Di Paola tells us:
Time's Up! is in favor of bike sharing, but we are more in support of bike co-ops, which have been very successful all across the United States. Bike sharing usually comes from the corporate sector, while bicycle co-ops are rooted in the community and mostly staffed by volunteers. There are more than 200 bike co-ops in the United States, while there are most likely less than ten US cities that run bike sharing programs.
Ultimately, although a bike sharing program will be more beneficial to a city than driving or other public transportation systems, they usually don't last long and simply get a lot of press because of governmental and corporate public relation initiatives. Bike co-ops empower the community, offer cheap bicycles, and in some cases, offer the opportunity to recycle your own bike.
And for the ultimate analysis of the Times's bike share story, we yield the floor to Streetsblog's Ben Fried, who writes, "There’s an interesting story to be written about what it will take to operate a profitable bike-share system in New York, as the city has set out to do. Why did the Bloomberg Administration opt for a profit-making system rather than a larger, subsidized one? What would a successful system look like, and what will be the challenges to implementing it? How would New Yorkers use such a system? None of those questions were answered in the Times this weekend."
Tagged
bike lanes
bike share
cycling
cyclists
John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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