If you walk around DC, you’ll see bright red bike racks here and there, along with matching bicycles. They were installed about a year ago, and anyone can use them. It’s the city’s way of encouraging people to use bicycles instead of cars.
It hasn’t worked as planned. According to my colleague Marc Scribner, before the Bikeshare program, about 1.6 percent of person-trips in the city were on bikes. Now it’s 1.9 percent.
That 0.3 percent gain comes at a steep price:
The Capital Bikeshare bikes cost around $1,000 a piece and have a life cycle of six years. Annual operating costs are somewhere closer to $2,000 per bike. In the past two years, I have spent approximately $500 on my personal bike that I commute to work on daily — $250 a year. Capital Bikeshare’s costs given the benefits are simply absurd.
Inertia Wins! 
Wow that is a steep price? Especially if you don’t consider the more than $1,000,000 in revenue the system earned. Or consider how many more people a capital bikeshare bike serves than Marc Scribner’s bike does? Or any of the many benefits that bike sharing provides? If you just say how much money it costs – without comparing it to the cost of any alternatives, like roads – it sure seems expensive. It is a small part of total trips, that is paid for with a miniscule amount of transportation funding.
Let’s do this. DC spent $1.2 million on bikesharing in year 1 (less revenue), but about $520,000,000 on roads. So it sure spent a lot more on roads. That makes bike sharing seem like a real deal.
Dave:
I average considerably more trips at greater distances than the average CaBi bike. It’s trips that matter (and the alternative mode trips they are substituting), not raw number of users.
Using your figures, D.C. spent $1.20/bike-share trip. There were 438 million auto + road transit person trips in D.C. according to 2009 NHTS. That works out to a little under $1.19 per road trip. This is just fiscal, excluding the benefits of freight access and assuming trip characteristics and users are the same (which isn’t the case). And what of the fact that bikes use the roads? Where’s this “real deal” you speak of? There really is no serious argument for CaBi that can withstand scrutiny.
Marc, really? You ride your bike 4 times a day, every day of the year including weekends and holidays? That’s way more trips than the average person takes and it makes you an anomaly. Not sure how comparing bikeshare use to an anomalous individual is useful.
And so what if you use your bike more? You pay 10 times more than a CaBi user does to do so – and that doesn’t count your storage costs or the theft/damage risk you take on. If you were to replace your bike with a CaBi membership you’d have $700 extra to spend or save as you see fit – instant stimulus. Doesn’t that make more sense than paying for a bike that spends almost it’s entire day sitting unused? What does your personal bike use have to do with CaBi?
My numbers were wrong by the way. It turns out DDOT made $300,000 last year. How does that change your feelings?
It’s interesting that when looking at my numbers, you’re suddenly willing to consider benefits (trips) but you aren’t in your posting. My point was that you need to consider both, which you don’t do.
Dave, a “trip” is A to B, not A to B to A. Let me put it this way, if I only used my bike for commuting from home to work on weekdays, that would mean I made two trips. On a typical weekday, I make 4-6 trips (I often make 2 before work and 2 after work + commuting). On weekends, I regularly make 8-10 trips/day — and some of those are quite long. And, yes, I even bike in the winter, having invested in gloves and a hat. Some days, I admit, I take the bus. But those are fairly rare (even in the winter).
I “pay more” than a CaBi user, and that is exactly the problem. They don’t face the costs of their use. I do. And they should too.
The $300,000 doesn’t include capital costs (you know, for instance, that CMAQ is 80/20 federal, right?).
Well, that is a lot of trips. Again, how does your anecdotal evidence about a weird person who takes 8-10 trips a day apply? Why are you even introducing anecdotal evidence.
Yes you pay more. Because only you use it. Just as you would pay more for your back yard than your share of a park. But there are 18 members per bike. And so the costs per person goes down – even though the bikes are more expensive.
I get that there are capital costs. If CaBi gets ad revenue and continued growth, it can probably capture enough money to cover those too. But that isn’t the point. CaBi won’t try to make a lot of money. They could make more money by raising rates, just as the government could make more money by raising the gas tax. But they’d get fewer trips. And this is a DDOT enterprise, not a business. DDOT is interested in moving people, not making money.
Dave, I still don’t think you grasp what constitutes a “trip.” Eight to 10 trips is not particularly out of the ordinary for healthy young adults in urban areas. Americans average (mean) four trips per day, a figure that includes infants, the elderly, and the disabled. Is this starting to make more sense?
The “members per bike” figure again does not tell the full story, as that doesn’t segregate membership. And if this were such a great deal, why is membership subsidized, i.e., below the market price? Why are you so opposed to yuppies paying for their dumb little toys?
And “They could make more money by raising rates, just as the government could make more money by raising the gas tax. But they’d get fewer trips.”? Really? What’s the price elasticity of demand for Capital Bikeshare bike rentals? That would be an interesting question because it could shed light on how much people actually value this particular project. I hope you’re right that price is very elastic and that people will quickly respond by switching to substitute transit modes, which would bolster my point that CaBi is completely idiotic. When you subsidize something, you get more of it, but more isn’t better when the something isn’t desirable in the first place.
Marc, I do know what a trip is – there is no need to talk down to me. And you take twice as many as the average person. Is that not a lot? Twice as many as average sounds like a lot. I’m unaware of any numbers for “healthy young adults” perhaps you could point me to some?
Membership is below the market price because we want to encourage more people to bike. Biking is good for public health, the environment and congestion. So the positive externalities make up for the subsidy.
“Why are you so opposed to yuppies paying for their dumb little toys?”
Are we resorting to name-calling? That’s always a convincing argument.
People are paying for bike sharing, so much so that it covers operating costs with money to spare.
I don’t know the price elasticity, but it’s highly unlikely that they’ve maximized revenue. That would require a brilliant shot. Most people I talk to view it as a bargain, which means that they would pay more.
More biking is desirable. That’s the whole point.