Reclaiming the Commons: The Case for Public Bike Libraries
Toward the next 50 billion trips on bikes held in common
Between the US and Canada, Montreal has the best bikeshare.
Montreal’s Bixi is fast — no thanks to its ponderous bikes. It’s because a station is often close by. Bixi continues to grow — this year it added 1,000 bikes on to its existing 6,250 bike fleet, in order to cover five new neighborhoods.
Each bike sees about four rides a day (2017, 2018). Any less than that, and service may not be sustainable.
Fewer than four daily uses per bike can result in financial unsustainability for the operator (i.e., user fees not able to cover cost to operate each bike).
Institute of Transportation and Development Policy, p. 22
Montreal is considered the best major city for biking in North America. Use of transport and cycling are relatively high. In other words, Montreal is a best case scenario. The government has found it necessary to subsidize rides, to provide bikeshare on its current scale. I live along a popular cycling route, firmly within Bixi’s coverage area, and still some 85%+ of riders are on their own bike.
The city pays Bixi’s operator $4m CAD (~$3m USD) a year. Through 2019, it will have spent $60m total on the system. The city will spend around $0.70 per ride taken this year, roughly in league with what subscribers pay (7 months of service per year for $94).
While Bixi is well loved by a city more than happy to subsidize it so, one can’t say the same for many cities elsewhere in North America, where bikeshare is in retreat.
What hope do other cities have for successful bikeshare, where biking is harder and funding is scarce?
Not much. In 2018, rides from station based systems hardly grew in the US:
In the US, 2018 growth was from dockless bike share, in blue above. Dockless pedal bikes have nearly disappeared since. (The associated NACTO report says rides from station-based systems grew 9% in 2018, though the graph above doesn’t depict that for some reason.)
If we look at station-based bikeshare in more detail, we see that bikeshare shrank, outside a handful of cities.
Increasingly, it looks like America is tapped out for bikeshare. With some 400 billion trips taken annually in America, American bikeshare plateauing at ~0.05 billion (50 million) isn’t very impressive. Or influential.
In 2016, New York’s celebrated Citi Bike was responsible only for 8% of bike rides (14 / 168 million). Projecting New York bike trips out to 2018, we get some 10–11% of bike rides with Citi Bike.
“But Scooters!”
The US saw some ~40 million shared scooter rides in 2018. Scooters have been deployed in places that never dreamed of getting bikeshare. It’s plausible they’ll do 100 million rides in 2019. Cities are asking, why fund bikeshare when cities can get scooters that are more popular — and FREE?
Despite the nominal similarities, scooters simply do not deliver the same amenity — affordable, daily transport. Where bikeshare costs $100–200 USD for an unlimited annual subscription, scooters are $3–4+ for a mile ride, more than a cab or a first class plane ticket on a per mile basis. Average rides per user was reported at under 2 per month in various cities — before prices were hiked; Lime had reported 3.4 rides per lifetime user, in February 2019 (it has since stopped reporting user counts). Compare with bikeshare, where subscribers commonly take over a hundred rides a year. With prices and losses spiraling upwards, access to shared scooters outside big cities may even decline in 2020.
Shared scooters may even worsen bikeshare’s woes; existing bikeshares sell short term passes at a much higher rate per trip, to make subscriptions for residents cheaper (i.e. a cross-subsidy). Results so far are mixed. Bikeshare in Santa Monica, the birthplace of shared scooters and global tourist destination, has seen trips drop by a third, while its peer in Salt Lake City continues to grow.
And Electric Bikeshare?
Electric bikeshare isn’t much different from scooters. JUMP has recently hiked prices for its service to $0.25-$0.30 a minute in most American cities where it’s active, while giving up on servicing San Antonio, Texas and Orlando, Florida.
The JUMP ebike has a three year operating, 30,000 mile claimed lifespan. Which, at a nominal 5–6 minutes per mile (10-12 miles per hour vs 7.85 for Capital Bikeshare), would mean riders collectively spend an astonishing $37,500 to $54,000 per bike, at a clip of $0.25–$0.30 per minute, for a bike with a $1,600 replacement cost, according to JUMP’s terms of service. The economies from sharing a vehicle are evidently nothing as compared to the cost of vandalism, servicing and recharging. A survey of Vermont e-bike owners found riders averaged 1,440 miles annually — buying a personal ebike would pay itself back within the first year, compared to JUMP.
And prices for consumers have only climbed and climbed in the past two years, despite improvements in operations and vehicle design, suggesting JUMP and others chronically underestimated operating costs at full scale. With multiple firms competing in cities like Denver and Los Angeles, demand for rides is quickly saturated by increased vehicle supply, with rides per vehicle plummeting, from 5+ per day to less than 3 among scooters in Austin, Texas. Calls for state subsidies of electric bikeshare are not far off.
Lyft, for its part, is expanding its electric bikeshare in DC and New York, but will charge $1 or $2 per trip on top of subscription dues, respectively (and $0 extra for its Bay Area system).
In New York and Chicago, Lyft has promised to invest tens of millions of dollars a year in bikeshare, including in providing ebikes. But aside from smaller operators targeting college campuses, the industry has shown little interest in investing and expanding elsewhere.
Meanwhile, local governments hesitate to subsidize new bikeshare enough to make it work — which is understandable, given the low utilization rates these systems often experience, especially in areas lacking quality bike infrastructure. Paying $35+ a ride is not a recipe for survival.
There’s Still Room for Improvement for Bikeshare
Despite bikeshare being decades old, there are still opportunities for cutting costs — and the lower your costs, the more areas you can sustainably support.
Dockless bikes that lock to conventional bike racks, within an electronically designated area where appropriate, can reduce capital and operating costs from docks — Social Bicycle, now known as JUMP, pioneered the ‘smart bike, dumb dock’ approach, which let it beat rivals when bidding for contracts, as in Santa Monica. Cities will need to install more bike racks — to accommodate bike owners and bikeshare members alike.
Ditch the kiosks. The kiosks are the most expensive element of a bikeshare station, and still, the experience is universally plodding and mediocre. Visitors and new members can unlock bikes via an app they may already have, such as Lyft or a third party app. While cities have had reservations about requiring a smartphone to access public services, the bigger obstacle for the poor is actually a data plan; a station could simply have a low speed wifi node expressly for unlocking bikes. And without kiosks, you can…
Split up the docks to make bikeshare faster, and thus more popular. Multiply the stations by dividing them into pieces and scattering them; Instead of making the 5+ minute trek over cañon and dale to a station on each end of a 12 minute, 2 mile ride (the frustrating reality of Citi Bike on my visits there, where stations are giant but fewer), it’s now a 2 minute walk — 6 minutes less, or nearly 40% faster.
Less professional rebalancing, or none at all. JUMP in Montreal has said it doesn’t rebalance bikes. Maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
Get riders to rebalance instead, like Motivate’s Bike Angels, may also help cut costs and emissions (from rebalancing trucks), while enhancing public health. The net savings of ‘angels’ remains unclear, however, but attempts so far to flesh out “P2P” rebalancing have been rather tepid and limited so far.
Better algorithms for rebalancing bikes have been supposedly developed by numerous researchers, though it’s unclear which operators are using them, and what benefit they’ve seen (Examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
Still, for locations without the density of demand that bikeshare requires — or the subsidies to fill the gap — bikeshare is more limited in the areas it can cover. Bike lending, especially with a pared down menu of bikes to choose from, is not so constrained.
What’s the Point of Bikeshare Anyway?
It’s worth taking a step back to ask, why do we have bikeshare? Instead of fixating on the product, let’s consider what it’s for, and how to fulfill that need.
Bikeshare provides quick, easy, non-committal, affordable access to a quality bike, while relieving the user of having to secure and maintain a bike.
Ride me, I’m Cheap And Easy
A bike specifically is valuable because it provides fast, point to point transport in a city, at a lower cost to society than any other transport mode besides walking (and propinquity). Walking and cycling is not suitable for every trip taken, of course, but where they do, it is the most sustainable choice for public health and public finances alike.
Shared bikes can guarantee access to a bike that’s wisely equipped, with lights, parts in good repair, and components suited for local conditions.
Why Not Just Lend Bikes?
A public bike library can solve the same general need that bikeshare does — quick, cheap easy access to a bike. Members would pay a modest, $5–15 monthly fee for a safe, quality bike with lights, locks built in, and no liability to the rider for theft.
Lending has a number of virtues over conventional bikeshare:
- Efficient & Green: Much of bikeshare’s operating costs are in moving bikes around to meet demand— 55% of operating costs for DC’s bikeshare, according to BikePortland. Rebalancing is often done by truck, which means more crashes, injuries, pollution and emissions.
- Economical: Each bike slot in a station can have a capital cost of ~$4,000 and an annual operating cost of $1,300. At about 2.6 docks per bike, a ten year lifespan for the docks, a 7 year lifespan for a $1200 bike, that’s ~$4,000 per year per bike. At 2.6 rides a day, it’s about $4 per ride. Given that the average American does 3–4 trips per day, utilization of these bikes is not much higher, if at all, then an avid bike commuter, without considering all the other costs, like rebalancing. A quality library bike would cost $500-$1,000, plus ~$100 or less in annual maintenance, and can last decades.
- Fast: Instead of having to walk several minutes to a station before and after each trip, one can park their bike usually right at their destination.
- Stable: Bikeshare is vulnerable to a vicious cycle — low utilization leads to fewer stations, and then, a longer walk to the station, and effectively slower trips; a bike library is much less sensitive to the density of local usage
- Reliable: Using bikeshare means being at the whim of supply and demand of bikes at nearby stations; despite a top shelf bikeshare system, here in Montreal, I still can’t get a bike home if I end up working late. With lending, access to your bike is virtually guaranteed
- Flexible: Without every bicycle needing to suit everyone, offering multiple bike models is easier with a lending model; at scale, it could offer everything from adaptive to kids’ to electric to cargo to folding models vs the near-uniformity of existing bikeshare, where all bikes must fit everyone
- Equitable: In areas that are mostly residential, or mostly commercial, bikeshare stations are prone to running out at given times of day. If you simply must travel at those times — for a graveyard shift, or after walking your kids to school, bikeshare will fail you frequently. And that’s assuming the bike fits you — maybe you require a cargo bike or an adaptive cycle. A bike that is expressly yours avoids these problems.
- Deterrence: Assigning a bike to a given person may reduce vandalism vs ‘ownerless’ bikes and scooters with communal or corporate brands. After all, it’s only you that will ride it every day.
To be sure, there are trips bikeshare serves that lending cannot. And these are often the trips that make bikeshare so logistically difficult to begin with — one-way trips that require tremendous ‘rebalancing’ efforts.
Put bluntly, these trips should not be prioritized, when we can serve many more people more affordably and more effectively, with an alternative. Plus, with bike security taken care of, leaving your bike overnight elsewhere isn’t the worrisome prospect it is with your own bike.
Lending also has some benefits over conventional personal ownership, for casual cyclists:
- Low Risk: Buying a bike from a bike shop means losing hundreds of dollars in depreciation, immediately; this is especially daunting if you’re not sure you’ll use the bike often because your city isn’t so bike-friendly, or in the future (eg after a move to Florida). The initial cost of even a cheap new bike can be several times the annual cost of maintaining it.
- Faster Takeup of Good Places to Bike: If good bike infrastructure arrives in a city, it may spur interest in biking, but people who don’t have a good bike ready and need to spend hundreds to get one will take longer to get going. Borrowing can cut that setup time, much like bikeshare.
- Easier to get started: In North America, few bikes as sold are suited for commuting and routine transport. You can spend a lot of time finding a worthy new bike; puzzling over part selections is not something most non-cyclists enjoy; a lending program does all this work for the user through careful bike design choices, and can also reduce waste and excess consumption of goods.
- Automatic Theft Insurance: Instead of having to carry around three locks at all times, and giving up completely on parking a half-decent bike on the street overnight, a library can deter theft with proprietary parts, and offer built-in complimentary theft coverage. I’ve heard from many people in major cities with old buildings like Montreal and New York, that a lack of secure bike parking is what stops them from getting their own bike — or even from using the one they already have.
- Safety for other road users: Pedestrians and other cyclists will appreciate the lights built-in to a library bike — despite a litany of threats and interventions, many riders do not equip their personal bikes with lights when riding at night, endangering themselves and others. And no solution is in sight. As with bikeshare, this would immediately become a non-issue among the bike library members.
- Less scope for police harassment: Fear of harassment from police is one obstacle to cycling among people of color, and bikes automatically equipped as required by law, with lights, bells, reflector and all gives police one less excuse to harass them.
- A gateway to better riding: The library system could provide outreach to members on how to ride safely, much like how motorcycle licensing strongly encourages riders to take classes in person; e-bike and cargo-bike users could be required to take a volunteer taught course before borrowing their bikes
The Dream of Bikeshare, and the Dismal Reality
The dream of bikeshare was a good one — with all these bikes lying around idle, why not use fewer by sharing them? And indeed, in a mixed use area with people going in all directions at all hours, it can work brilliantly. “Downtown bikeshare can compliment rail”, thanks to the nexus of commuters who subscribe to reach their job daily from the station, and occasional visitors who pay a high cost per use, and thereby subsidize the commuters.
But whole cities and even neighborhoods don’t work that way. As with public transit, whenever operations prove sustainable, pressure mounts to expand it to places where it won’t pencil — to places where more prudent solutions abound. So these systems are always teetering on the brink of solvency.
Unfortunately, it seems most people treat public finances like someone else’s slush fund — not something to worry about until the check bounces. Which is happening now.
The freedom to get and discard a bike at will is a real pleasure. But a system that prizes say, biking downhill only, or to a bar to get drunk, comes at quite a toll, to the point of bikeshare vanishing in many places, and without the benefits that lending provides. The fixation on convenience at any cost is the miasma of an ‘on-demand’ sector now in shambles — let’s not let our public amenities reach the same sorry state.
Outside the cities where Lyft is dangling massive bikeshare investment, there is little appetite for new public bikeshares, and geographic growth of existing systems is slow to nil. And if Lyft can’t make its bikeshare investments back in Chicago and New York City, the same way it has failed with ridehail, even those preeminent systems will be in jeopardy at their expanded scale. It’s not a matter of ‘what do I like’, but ‘what can we achieve?’
For-Profit Forebears: Swapfiets & Vanmoof
Lending a bike isn’t new — but here are two of the latest renditions.
Founded in 2014, the startup Swapfiets has amassed 124,000+ subscribers paying €12–20 a month to lease a personal, simple Dutch bike. In 2017, it saw 1600% growth. If subscribers average 2 miles a day, it would amount to as much distance covered by Lime riders, if not more (Lime rides climbed 205k per day between February and April), and without the massive cash burn.
Vanmoof is a company that sells bikes feted for their design — but it also leases them, at a cost of €98 down plus €25 a month; the leases are transferable, so if someone gave you their lease, you wouldn’t have to pay Vanmoof the initial €98 down.
Both services will cover all repairs and replace your bike in case of theft.
While many claim that ‘public transportation doesn’t pay,’ and always requires subsidy, these companies appear to be getting along just fine. At Swapfiets’ prices, it’s already competitive with the $100–200 annual bikeshare subscription typically costs — and public systems may have lower capital costs, access to free space, and credible ‘spillover benefits’ to draw on via public subsidy.
There are many other organizations that offer variants of lending, from the national ‘bikeshare’ systems in Belgium & the Netherlands, to the Catholic University of Leuven. France is set to deploy its own ebike lending service in Paris and elsewhere.
How Would Bike Lending Work?
Already, for-profit bike lending has prices roughly on par with bikeshare, if not less, when you account for the subsidies bikeshare receives. A lending system explicitly designed for mass, affordable use, that draws on public resources, would offer better bikes at less cost for more people. The serviceable coverage area would also be much greater, because a lending system doesn’t need much density of demand or load-balancing across time and place to be viable.
The Bike
The main bike offered would be something akin to German city bikes — a bike that can be ridden upright or bent forward, with built-in locks, racks, lights, an internally geared hub and chaincase to allow outdoor long term parking, and with proprietary parts that discourage theft. The bike would come in multiple sizes, and in different frame styles (step over and step through); the library’s mechanics could adjust saddle and stem positioning to suit riders.
The bikes could have wireless anti-theft technology, using Bluetooth mesh networks or 4G connections — but this may prove unnecessary, costly, or invasive. Like the Cannondale Treadwell, it could have a sensor that tracks usage (distance and time, not locations) to share with the user, and if properly anonymized, with researchers.
There might be additional models and varying prices — such as adaptive bikes for those with disabilities, folding bikes to complement public transit commutes, electric bikes for the elderly and/or longer, hillier trips, or children’s models. These could be priced at cost, or subsidized for social benefit.
Logistics: Local, Simple
New bikes would be deposited for pickup at a network of participating bike shops. New library members would choose a bike model online or in store, and retrieve it at the shop of their choice.
When a bike needs repairs, the member would take their bike in at no cost; shops would be reimbursed based on fixed rates for service, covered by subscription dues. Each shop would have a couple one size fits all loaner bikes ready, for visitors and members waiting on a bike repair. These shops would get customized tools to remove and replace specialty anti-theft parts as needed.
There would be enough bike shops participating so that a rider in the service area would never have to travel more than a kilometer or two to get a repair done. Mobile mechanics could come with a reasonable surcharge. Riders could receive discounts for doing their own maintenance, and get complimentary stand time at local ‘bicycle kitchens,’ whom the system operator would reimburse.
Relying on existing bike shops allows the library to start operations faster and more cheaply; it increases usage of existing assets instead of building new ones, and supports rather than replaces community enterprise. It also avoids fleets of gaseous trucks crisscrossing the city.
Shops would also rent these bikes to visitors for say $5–10 a day, while residents might pay $50–150 a year (annual subscriptions would offer savings to encourage biking year round and maximum utilization). A deposit of say $100 on each subscription may be prudent, to discourage abuse, neglect and abandonment of bikes. The cost of the bike would run between $500–1,000 USD at cost, based on VSF Fahrradmanufaktur’s entry level offering costing ~$700+ at retail.
While existing transport subsidies could be shifted slightly to make service free, because bikes are so cheap, a modest fee can reduce hoarding and disuse, especially since bikes left outdoors decay over time regardless of usage, and occupy valuable public space. As with bikeshare, local sponsors might foot much of the cost.
Shops would profit from selling personal bikes to those members wanting something more specialized. Hotels and other businesses could borrow bikes as well to share with their clientele, or earn commissions by selling visitor passes, to entice tourists out of their Ubers and onto bikes.
Contracting: Public Utility for Civic Benefit
The local or regional government would select an operator to outfit a regional depot, and carry out receiving and distribution; the operator would decide how to run the system within the broad confines set by the government.
The government would cover capital costs to make replacing operators straight-forward, instead of an operator locking themself in through infrastructure or proprietary bike parts and ratcheting up prices or skimping on service. The government can get capital more cheaply than private firms, which allows lower prices for riders. People are also more willing to fund a public amenity than a private venture.
Public involvement also allows publicizing (‘open-sourcing’) how the model works, to spur the creation of libraries elsewhere faster, instead of a private firm jealously guarding its trade secrets.
Conventional bikeshare has succeeded in bringing the efficiency of competition without wasteful local redundancy — thanks to competitive contracting. Bike libraries can operate from the same playbook — with a private operator at the helm and the government mandating transparency, owning the system and retaining all rights.
Conclusion
Bikeshare is a brilliant idea — but in America beyond a few choice locales, its growth prospects are dim, its finances threadbare. Public bike libraries can provide more riders more benefit more quickly, at a lower cost, without requiring a density of demand that proves elusive beyond Manhattan and Market Street. It can provide some of the perks of vehicle ownership while alleviating some of its risks. It may even provide a footprint for mass affordable access to ebikes.
In the face of human and ecological crisis, our cities have shown an abject poverty of will; retracing the status quo will only sink us further — and shirking our role to the for-profit sector has proven inadequate, wasteful and inequitable. Rather than shrinking the public sphere, we need an ethic of radical abundance in the public interest, suited to the challenges of our time and place, an expansion of the wealth we hold in common. Our ancestors built libraries and water fountains so that none would thirst; we must extend their gift of public wealth to a new era, and ‘affirm the most ancient values of beauty and human dignity’; moving freely through clean air and placid streets is our birthright, and it is a right we ought to restore.
