Bike-share programs, when they work well, are an excellent supplement to a city’s transit system, providing a cheap and healthy way for residents and tourists to get around. In the cities where bike shares have been most successful, such as Paris and New York City, the distinctive looking bikes and docking stations have become part of the city’s identity.
So we wish RightBike all the best in its attempt to modestly expand their small bike share program with a $30,000 grant from the city’s Better Neighbourhoods fund. In our news story this issue, RightBike’s organizers say their goal is to build eight more docking stations on top of their existing seven and add 15 bikes for a total fleet of 80.
However, bike-share programs are still struggling in many cities, and particularly in Canada. Montreal’s publicly owned bike share company, Bixi, filed for bankruptcy protection in January. Toronto’s bike-share system, initially installed as a small pilot project in 2011, has been chronically underused and had to be bailed out by the city last year. Ottawa’s other bike share program, Capital Bixi, is owned by the National Captial Commission but operated by bankrupted Bixi. The 250-bike system is very small compared to most cities, loses a lot of money on operating costs, and is up for sale.
The good news is that we now have a pretty good idea of what it takes for a bike-share program financially sustainable, thanks to the ever-increasing number of universities and think tanks that have devoted time to studying them. The bad news is that Ottawa’s bike-share programs do not score well on this front.
One key finding of the bike-share studies is that the coverage area and station density of a system is closely linked to its chances of success. The cities with well-functioning bike shares launched their systems with thousands of bikes and hundreds of docking stations; contrast this to Ottawa’s meagre numbers and limited coverage areas.
Here, for example, is what the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, a New York-based think tank, says in its guidelines for designing bike share programs: “When beginning to plan a system, identifying a coverage area and saturating it with the appropriate number of stations are the most critical factors in creating a successful system with high ridership.” In the same vein, Elliot Fishman, an academic at Australia’s Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety who specializes in bike shares, told The Globe and Mail last summer that “the worst thing a city can do is produce a very small (bike share) pilot scheme . . . That’s almost setting up something to fail.”
Sound familiar? Instead of a large, comprehensive bike-share system that provides the public with a convenient form of transportation, Ottawa has a patchwork of small programs that are unlikely to ever gain the ridership numbers needed for the system to be both useful and financially self-sustaining.
RightBike can overcome these odds, of course. But we suspect that if Ottawa is ever going to have a bike share program that is sustainable for the longterm, city council will need to show some leadership in planning, funding and implementing an appropriately sized system.