Letting Residents Ask for What They Want: The Equity Implications of the Launch of Washington, D.C. and Chicago’s Bikeshare Programs
By Gabe Klein, Co-Founder and Partner, Cityfi
Equity is one of those often-overused terms that people can throw around without a lot of thought, or at least without thought as to how equity can truly be embedded into implementation practices. As head of the Department of Transportation in Washington D.C., I was there when the City launched Capital bikeshare. Now 10 years ago (wow!), our team thought about equity with this project, and as such, we made sure that we would place stations and bikes in lower income neighborhoods. Upon reflection, we could have done much better. For instance, we could have gotten more input from the community, built more safe facilities, and marketed the program more.
We learned from this, and by the time I got to Chicago to run their Department of Transportation, responsibility for the local bikeshare was transferred to the private sector. That gave us the chance to rethink how we would deliver service to all Chicagoans. One of the biggest changes we implemented may seem counterintuitive — we actually did not initially launch in lower-income neighborhoods en masse. Instead, we opted to launch the nodal system in the central part of the city that sees the greatest density, parking problems and most likely early adopters of the bikeshare. We wanted to make it an initial success in this area, while also making sure to have funding to launch into other neighborhoods as residents and Aldermen asked for the service. Below is an excerpt from my book, Start-Up City, which details this experience:
When launching a service that will become an integral part of a city’s transportation network, it is important to let the public play a big role in the planning process. In D.C., we let the public pick the name of the system and also give input on station locations. In Chicago, we took the planning process one step further and hired the top-flight civic data firm Open Plans to design a station crowdsourcing website, as New York had done for their bike share. The website gave citizens an opportunity to pinpoint desired station locations on an interactive map, giving them direct input in the planning process, while creating an immense data pool for the system’s planners and designers. In addition to this crowdsourcing platform, the city used social media to engage the public…Through these marketing efforts, we informed potential customers about the features, advantages, and benefits of the system, a critical service because bike share was new and not intuitive for many prospective users.
We also tried to extend the Divvy brand and make our marketing efforts fun and engaging…our marketing efforts helped us to win over a city that is often, understandably, skeptical of government and its offerings. From day one, I was happy to see people of all ages and ethnicities using Divvy to get around the city.
The verdict was in — Chicago loved Divvy. I had learned a lot too. Equally important, there seemed to be less of a “bike stigma” as a result. Outside of some pushback from a thin slice of Chicagoans, and the normal auto-centric folks, the feeling was not that this service was for one group or another. There was a recognition that Divvy was good for everyone.
People seemed to understand that like any new transit system, it had to grow, and that we had not reached certain neighborhoods yet. We followed the traditional sharing economy model of launching in the densest areas of the city first to build demand. The positive here was that people started writing, calling, tweeting, and entering on the website that they wanted Divvy stations in less dense, often less affluent neighborhoods. In 2015, between 175 and 250 more stations are planned for installation around Chicagoland, and the system will become regional, like Capital Bikeshare. With this expansion, many traditionally underserved neighborhoods will finally get service. The positive side of this strategy? Instead of people feeling that something was being foisted upon them, or that this was part of some scheme to gentrify their neighborhood, we had community members asking us to bring Divvy to them. Using this demand-based strategy helped the service to take hold and become a healthy part of the neighborhood fabric and character, not only adding transportation options for people, but also adding a sense of place, and a sense of pride and fairness that every neighborhood is deserving of the most up-to-date services.
Skipping ahead to 2021, Divvy continues to set records in ridership, which went from a light to full fledged public-private partnership, and is now with Lyft as the concessionaire. They have now invested in hundreds of new stations as well as thousands of electric bikes across the city, particularly in traditionally underserved communities. On top of that, the partnership is investing $77 million in infrastructure throughout the city.
As the cities of the Knight AV Initiative (Pittsburgh, San Jose, Miami-Dade County, and Detroit) work toward the goal of launching AV pilots that meet an identified need in their communities, these lessons from Chicago and Washington, D.C. are top of mind. In our efforts to serve our cities equitably, including ensuring that all people have access to mobility options that are safe, efficient and affordable, we often pilot new solutions to test out what will or will not work to meet a community’s needs. However, we must be cognizant that vulnerable communities are already facing many barriers, and therefore often don’t want to be the subjects of this type of trial and error. Testing new solutions can be especially crippling for a neighborhood if a mobility service is provided where it is desperately needed, but then is taken away because it was found to not be financially sustainable. Further, due to the historical failings of our systems, many marginalized communities maintain distrust for their local government, and/or have experienced fatigue from being engaged often by their local municipality. This means that leaders need to be delicate in fostering, not eroding, the trust that does exist.
To do this effectively, the answer may lie in what seems counterintuitive: to provide services first in areas based on factors like density and greater likelihood of resident uptake rather than perceived need. This approach provides time for a pilot to be proven out, and also gives vulnerable communities the opportunity to see the benefits of the service and request it of their own accord. In short — get to an equitable distribution of services the quickest by focusing on the quality and sustainability of the overall service first, whether it be a bike share, scooter share or AV delivery robots. This should be done in tandem with engaging the public through multiple, accessible means to give valuable input about the service so that residents can feel both ownership over and familiarity with it. As that service becomes an established part of your city, it will allow all members of the community to see it as something they both want to use and ask for.
