Tag: Cincy Bike Share

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Initial $2M Phase of Cincy Bike Share On-Pace for September Opening

Cincy Bike Share Bike [Provided]

Cincinnati Bike Share Station MapCincinnati city officials and community leaders are expected to gather at Fountain Square Tuesday morning to unveil the first of Cincy Bike Share’s 35 stations. The ceremony will mark the official start to construction of Ohio’s second and largest bike share system.

Queen City Bike says that the process will move quickly, with two to three stations being installed daily until all 35 stations planned for Downtown and Uptown are built. At the same time, there will be a volunteer effort to assemble the system’s 300 bikes.

“We hope to assemble at least 200 bike share bikes by Friday,” said Frank Henson, President of Queen City Bike, and member of Cincy Bike Share’s Board of Trustees. “This is being done by area volunteer mechanics under the supervision of B-Cycle.”

The aggressive schedule puts the system on track to open by early September, which is not far off the initial goal of opening by August.

The progress comes after Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley (D) announced $1.1 million to more than half of the initial $2 million in upfront capital costs. At the time, Cincy Bike Share director, Jason Barron, said the commitment from the City of Cincinnati was critical in not only getting things moving, but also showing the private sector that it is all for real.

“The mayor’s commitment makes the project a true public private partnership,” Barron told UrbanCincy in April. “The City’s commitment is important to the private funders we have been speaking to, and I believe that it will unlock the last bit of funds that we need.”

Bike share systems have been growing in popularity in North America over recent years. While the most notable are Washington D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare, Chicago’s Divvy and New York City’s Citi Bike, there are now dozens of other cities operating similar systems. The large number and established time period of operations now has given planners a chance to examine empirical data to see what works best.

The more complexities you add to a mode of transportation’s functionality, the less likely someone is to choose that given mode for their trip. This is something that is true across all modes of transportation. As a result, the station density and space contingency calculations have proven to be consistent indicators for a bike share system’s success or failure.

Studies have found that a higher station density is better, and that a target should be approximately 28 stations per square mile. For a city like Cincinnati, that averages out to be a station every couple of blocks. However, the number and placement of Cincy Bike Share stations will be much lower than this target.

When examining of each of the 35 station locations, the system’s station density can be calculated in two different ways. The first would look at just the immediate area in which the stations are located. The second would look at the intended service area for those stations. Naturally, the latter is a bit more subjective.

In the case of the first scenario, the Downtown/OTR portion of the system would have approximately 15 stations per square mile, while the Uptown portion would have 10. Overall, the system in its entirety would average out to a respectable 13 stations per square mile.

But under the more second scenario that factors for intended service area these numbers drop. In this case, Downtown/OTR would fall to 12 stations per square mile, and Uptown would plummet approximately four stations per square mile. Overall, the system total would average out to be nearly stations per square mile.

It is important to note that neither of these scenarios includes the Union Terminal station in its calculation since it is an outlier and would clearly skew the results. Furthermore, Downtown/OTR and Uptown were separated in their calculations since many planners and observers concede that the two areas will most likely operate in isolation of one another.

The point is to ensure that there are consistently stations within a short distance of one another so that if one station is full or empty, another station is close by for the potential user. If that user encounters such a situation, however, it is most likely that the potential user will avoid using bike share altogether and instead opt for a different mode.

One of the ways this can be combatted is through the use of real-time tracking technology that allows users to see exactly how many bikes or stalls are available at any station at any given time. This, of course, only aids those with access to data plans on compatible smart phones, and those who think to use it.

In order to fix the problem of full or empty stations, system operators perform ‘bike balancing’ which moves excess bikes from one station to another that is low on bikes. This balancing act proves to be one of the most costly elements of operating a bike share system. In Chicago and bigger cities they utilize small vans to move the bikes around. But in Salt Lake City, where their GREENBike system is quite small, they utilize trailers hitched to the back of other bikes.

As a result of this complex balancing act, and potential barrier to users, another key element of bike share systems is a space contingency at each station. What this means is that if a station has a capacity for 10 bikes, it should not be stocked with 10 bikes. Instead, data suggests that about a 50% space contingency is ideal.

In Cincinnati’s case, Cincy Bike Share will have enough bikes for there to be roughly nine docked at each of the system’s 35 stations. If the system were to fall in line with this 50% space contingency, which would mean that an additional four to five stalls should be available at any given time, meaning each station should have a total of 13-14 stalls. This, however, is not the case.

Cincinnati’s typical station will have 10 stalls, and thus only have a 10% space contingency. Cincy Bike Share officials have not yet commented as to how this will be mitigated, but a potential solution would be simply to not deploy all 300 bikes at once – something that seems reasonable since bikes will need to rotate in and out for repairs. In this case, a more appropriate number of bikes to be in use at any given time might be 240.

Cincinnati’s bikes are expected to be available for use 24 hours a day, and will most likely be available for use year-round. Cincy Bike Share will be responsible for setting the rate structure, which is not final yet, but annual memberships are pegged at $75 to $85 and daily passes between $6 to $8.

Uptown was originally envisioned as a second phase to the system; but now that it is being included in the initial rollout, it leaves an expansion to Northern Kentucky as the next logical choice.

More details are expected to be announced at the press event later in the week.

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News Opinion Transportation

Chicago Serves as a Model for Midwestern Cities Looking to Bolster Bicycling

Chicago and Lake Michigan [Jake Mecklenborg]

For the past few years anyone with an interest in bicycling has seen their Facebook and Twitter feeds stuffed daily with bike lane and bike share project updates from cities around the United States. Much of that news has come from our northern neighbor Chicago, where its first of 100 planned miles of protected bike lanes opened in 2012.

In 2013 Chicago also launched the nation’s third-largest bike share program, a 300-station network sprawling across large sections of the city. Then, in early 2014, construction began on the $60 million Navy Pier Flyover, an elevated structure that will speed Lakefront Trail bicycle traffic over the Chicago River and the congested Navy Pier tourist area.

In May I spent part of a vacation day biking 35 miles around Chicago to see its various recent bicycling improvements for myself. This ride included The Loop, parts of the Lakefront Trail, and various residential areas where bike lanes have been recently created.

Dearborn Street Two-Way Protected Bike Lane
This two-way protected bike lane opened on the otherwise one-way Dearborn Street in November 2012, and is among the most talked-about new bike lanes in the country. It occupies a 10-foot wide strip on the west side of this major north-south street, with bikes separated from vehicular traffic by bollards and on-street parking.

To manage conflicts between two-way bike and one-way automobile movements, bicycle traffic is controlled by dedicated signals at about a dozen intersections in The Loop.

I biked the length of this protected lane in both directions beginning at about 4:50pm on a weekday. It was immediately obvious that travel in the lane during rush hour was not particularly fast or orderly — pedestrians often stepped into the bike lane to hail cabs or to cross Dearborn Street mid-block. At cross-streets, bicycle traffic was sometimes unable to proceed when signaled due to surges of pedestrians or gridlocked traffic.

Bicyclist behavior within the protected lane was more chaotic than I expected.

Commuters riding their own bikes often passed slower Divvy bikes and northbound bikers sometimes drifted between the protected bike lane and Dearborn’s vehicular lanes. I observed a handful of northbound bicyclists ignoring the protected bike lane altogether, instead biking in mixed vehicular traffic up Dearborn Street as they had for the past 100 years.

Divvy Bikeshare
Chicago’s “Divvy” bike share system began operation on June 28, 2013 and by year’s end the system logged over 700,000 trips. This year the system is planned to expand from 300 to 400 stations and add 1,000 bicycles to its existing fleet of 3,000.

To say that the Divvy bikes are popular would be a gross understatement – the extent to which the blue bicycles have become a ubiquitous feature of Chicago’s cityscape in their first year has no doubt silenced all critics.

To that end, the utility of shared bicycles in Chicago is aided by the city’s flat layout. Recently a writer from Seattle expressed some skepticism of a planned bike share program’s popularity in the hilly Emerald City.

Similar questions have been raised locally and intensely debated on Internet forums. The questions bear enough validity to cause many proponents of Cincy Bike Share to concede that Uptown and Downtown operations may function and serve different customers from one another.

Navy Pier Flyover
Chicago’s Lakefront Trail stretches 18 miles along the city’s lakefront, and is home to a crush of bicycle traffic unlike anything to be seen in Cincinnati or elsewhere in the Midwest. In fact, the Active Transportation Alliance claims that Lakefront Trail is the busiest in the United States with peak daily usage reaching 30,000 people at key points.

Every type of bicycle and every type of rider uses the trail, along with joggers, walkers, and inline skaters – motivating the Chicago Tribune to remark earlier this year that the Lakefront Trail is “claustrophobic and dangerous—the antithesis of the shoreline as a refuge from urban crowding.”

The Navy Pier Flyover will link the north and south halves of the trail with 16-foot wide elevated approaches to the Outer Drive Bridge. The trail will cross the Chicago River on a new structure cantilevered off the west side of the famed 77-year-old bascule bridge.

General Observations
As someone who grew up biking the monster hills and hostile commercial avenues of Cincinnati’s west side in the 1980s, riding in Chicago – even the many areas without new bike lanes — is by comparison a piece of cake. So easy in fact that it’s boring.

Virtually all of Chicago’s streets are perfectly flat, perfectly straight, and traffic moves at pretty much the same speed and in the same fashion on all of them. There is little to no sense of exploration and discovery during a bike ride around Chicago – no wonder the Lakefront Trail is so popular when a ride between any two neighborhoods has the same character as any other combination.

No Chicago bicyclist knows anything like our varied street characteristics, our innumerable odd intersections, and of course the two-mile downhill runs that can be strung together between various Cincinnati neighborhoods.

Experimenting with side streets and alternate routes between points A and B is something that keeps the avid Cincinnati bicyclist exploring the city, year after year, and familiarity with all of the hills is a point of pride.

When Cincinnati’s bike share begins later this year, and if we eventually build more protected bike lanes beyond the current Central Parkway project, no doubt bicycling will become more popular in the center city, basin neighborhoods, and across the river in Covington and Newport.

Any city, however, can paint bike lanes and buy a few thousand bike share bikes, but the endless range of leisurely or challenging rides available to the Cincinnati bicyclist is something Chicago and most other American cities will never have.

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Arts & Entertainment News

URBANexchange Returns to Taste of Belgium in Corryville This Thursday

URBANexchange at Taste of BelgiumIt’s been a busy month for news, so what else could be better than a gathering with fellow urbanists to talk about it all?

General Electric will most likely either locate their new Global Operations Center at The Banks or in Oakley, Cincy Bike Share is rapidly advancing, the Central Parkway Cycle Track had all sorts of controversy, Toyota will relocate its North American headquarters to Plano, Texas, the Republicans in town are now all agush for the Cincinnati Streetcar, ground was finally broken on the second major phase of work at The Banks, and new tenants will soon open at Findlay Market.

Plus, on top of all that, we’ve had Jocelyn and John in Atlanta for the APA 2014 National Planning Conference, and Jacob running all around Colombia to check out their transport systems.

But nevertheless, URBANexchange will go on and we’ll be having this month’s event at Taste of Belgium on Short Vine in Corryville again. The last time we gathered here we were joined by Vice Mayor David Mann and a large group filled the room. And for this month, Councilmember Chris Seelbach and State Representative candidate Dale Mallory have confirmed their attendance on Facebook.

Due to all this recent news, we figure there will be lots to debate and gossip about, so try to make some time in your schedule to join us sometime between 5:30pm and 8:30pm at Taste of Belgium in Corryville.

This month we will be giving away two prepaid transit passes for Metro, who, by the way, recently updated their system maps to include other regional transit operators and show the route of the first phase of the Cincinnati Streetcar.

Those interested in attending can come and go at any time during the event, which is free and open to anyone who would like to participate. We do, however, ask that you kindly support our generous host by drinking and eating like a Belgian.

Categories
News Politics Transportation

APA14: Demographic Preferences Shifting in Favor of Walkable, Urban Communities

Shoppers at Findlay Market [Randy Simes]

One of the focuses coming out of the APA 2014 National Planning Conference in Atlanta is how to plan for the Millennials.

According to research conducted by the Pew Institute and Urban Land Institute, Millennials are driving less than previous generations, are more tuned into emerging technologies and demand living and working in, and experiencing urban settings.

“Millennials prefer amenity rich housing choices. These amenities are within walking distance,” presented Howard Ways of the Redevelopment Authority of Prince George’s County in Washington D.C. “They prefer smaller units with open floor plans and are not interested in yard work at all.”

Even though many recent numbers point to what is perceived as a huge desire for Millennials to return to center cities, data says otherwise.

According to Pew, 43% of Millennials prefer to live in the suburbs while 39% prefer to live in the urban core. This data suggests that there is great opportunity for cities and metropolitan regions to embrace urbanism through revitalizing distressed first ring neighborhoods and creating urban places by retrofitting suburbia.

The key component to attracting Millennials, however, seems to be the availability and quality of transportation options. According to those surveyed, 55% of Millennials have a preference to live close to transit.

Ways says that the transformation is not just limited to Millennials, as Baby Boomers are increasingly looking to take advantage of urban amenities.

According to AARP, 50% of seniors now want to live close to a bus stop and 47% want to live within a mile of a grocery store. Additionally, it is increasingly being seen that efforts by Millennials to influence policy such as complete streets, pedestrian enhancements and bicycle infrastructure are also helping Baby Boomers by improving the safety on our roadways.

With Cincinnati now offering more transportation choices, such as the Cincinnati Streetcar, Metro*Plus, Cincy Bike Share and private options such as Zipcar, Uber and Lyft, it seems that the city might be positioned just as well as any other city to appeal to these changing demographics. But what comes next?

With the recent controversy over the in road bicycle infrastructure and the lack of progress on the next phase of the Cincinnati Streetcar, will Cincinnati begin to fall behind in providing the necessary ingredients to continue to attract Millennials to the region?

One example offered at the conference is the success of Washington D.C.’s bike share program. With over 42,000 annual members and 410,000 causal riders, Harriet Tregoning, Director of HUD’s Office of Economic Resiliency, has found that 80% of Capital Bikeshare users bike more and 40% drive less due to the availability the system. For those users, this results in an annual cost savings of $819 over driving.

With the imminent launch of Cincy Bike Share this summer, access to bicycles will increase. However, with the lack of protected bike lanes and proper bicycle lane markings, the system may be negatively impacted.

Cincinnati city leaders should take note of shifting desires of Millennials and Baby Boomers, and continue to move forward with planning and developing new transportation choices such as an expanded streetcar system and more robust bicycle network.

John Yung is currently in Atlanta covering the APA 2014 National Planning Conference for UrbanCincy. You can follow along with additional live reporting on Twitter @UrbanCincy or on Instagram. All conference updates can be tracked by following the #APA14 hashtag.

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Business News Politics

EDITORIAL: Improve Efficiency, Grow Revenues with Urban Advertising Program

Cincinnati City Council made the well-intentioned decision to prohibit advertising within the public right-of-way. The idea was to rid the city of what some perceived as unsightly bus bench advertisements and invasive and heavily lit billboards.

As is often the case with new regulation, it has created unintended consequences including the inability for Metro to collect advertising revenue from their bus shelters and stymieing the ability for Cincy Bike Share to properly advertise on its planned system in order to pay for its annual operating expenses.

As a result, the City of Cincinnati should toss out the ordinance approved last January and replace it with a new comprehensive Urban Advertising Program that protects residents from unsightly additions in their neighborhoods, while also preserving the flexibility for the city and its various agencies to collect revenues that reduce the burden placed upon taxpayers.

SORTA Non-Transportation Revenue

Public Right-of-Way Advertising Lease
Under UrbanCincy’s proposed plan, the City of Cincinnati would lease their advertising assets. These assets would include a predetermined set of advertising locations (bus benches and shelters, newspaper stands, bike share kiosks, car share and taxi cab stands, and intercity bus stops).

The lease with the private company that would manage the system would then include a small upfront payment for the rights to the assets and annual payments to an authority that would oversee the program.

Such agreements are commonplace in many other North American cities and are often undertaken by companies like JCDecaux, Clear Channel and Lamar.

Program Membership & Representation
In this proposed arrangement the City of Cincinnati would be one entity, albeit the primary one, in the overall program since they control the right-of-way. The Southwest Ohio Regional Transit Authority (SORTA) would also be involved so that they could have representation for their Metro bus and streetcar systems. Cincy Bike Share would then be a third organization that would need to be represented, along with a representative for private taxi cab, car share and intercity bus companies.

The City’s established Community Councils should also have representation on the board, and potentially even share directly in the revenues generated by the program outside of those funds paid to the City of Cincinnati.

The share of the annual revenue payments, of course, would not include any of the private companies operating within the public right-of-way, such as Megabus or Zipcar, but their representation on the board would ensure that their interests are in fact considered in the oversight of the program.

Essentially their lack of collecting annual revenue payments would serve as their annual payment to advertise their particular operations within the public right-of-way without needing to go through the private company managing the assets. This allows those companies to advertise for their services in the public right-of-way, which is currently prohibited.

The members appointed by these various agencies and companies would then become the decision making board governing the new program. This board would also be responsible for contracting out the management of the program.

Urban Advertising Program Org Chart

Economies of Scale
Bringing all of these various entities under one roof, with one unified leasing strategy, will increase the value of public right-of-way advertising. Businesses could work with their advertising representatives to ensure the exact market saturation, exposure and risk aversion as is desired. They would have one contact point that could manage their advertisement campaign in a comprehensive, city-wide manner.

This would also mean that the various government agencies and private companies operating in the public right-of-way involved would not need to have their own full-time staff equivalent to manage their own individual advertising program. Instead, they would collectively decide upfront on an initial value assessment of their various assets, and an ongoing value share agreement based on the contracted annual payments.

Standard Guidelines
The appointed board would be able to determine what kind of content to allow to be advertised. This would need to be a decision made up-front and in conjunction with the private operator so that there is no confusion later. But this would, in theory, allow advertising to return but in a regulated marketplace, thus preserving neighborhood character and integrity.

This is not something that can be accomplished without a separate operator involved, since the City and other public entities are not allowed to decide who and who cannot advertise.

Right now none of these entities are able to take advantage of the potential advertising revenues that would otherwise be available. And if they were, the total profits from the system would be severely diluted due to the fractured and duplicative management and oversight needed.

This Urban Advertising Program would solve those problems by allowing for the capture of an unrealized revenue stream in a well-regulated manner that would protect the integrity of our neighborhoods.

But perhaps even better is that the program is scalable and could include other cities like Norwood, Covington and Newport to opt in should they so choose. All that would change is the representation on the board and the share of the annual revenue payments.

Advertising is part of everyday life. By prohibiting our local governments and public agencies from benefiting from the revenues that come with it, we are only tying their hands and placing an even greater burden on taxpayers. There is certainly a balance to be struck, but UrbanCincy is confident that the representatives that would make up this board would be more than capable at striking that right balance.

This is the third part in a series of proposals offered by UrbanCincy that would help grow city revenues, enhance public services and make for a more efficient local government. If you are interested, you can read our proposal for shifting to a Pay As You Throw trash collection system and our eight-point plan for fixing the city’s broken parking system.