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On April 24, Mayor Michael A. Nutter, along with Deputy Mayor for Transportation and Utilities Rina Cutler, announced the City of Philadelphia would be implementing a long-anticipated bike share system with a spring 2015 launch. The City is putting forth $3 million in an initial capital investment but with the explicit idea that no other City monies will be used after the initial investment. That responsibility will fall, primarily, on two of the winners of the City’s Request for Proposals: Bicycle Transit Systems and B-Cycle.
With 60 stations and 600 bikes, the program will essentially function as its own transit system, but will help let Philadelphians make connections that gaps in service and distances from stops make challenging. For as little as $100 a year, bike share users will be able to pick up a bike at their closest station and leave it at another station nearest their destination.
Talk of a bike share program has been in the media with ample requests from cycling advocates for years. But it seems like the wait might be worth it, as a handful of bike share programs have struggled due to insufficient support.
“We’re definitely the last big city to be implementing bike share, and the nice thing about that is that you have the capacity to learn from what lots of other systems have done,” Alex Doty, the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia’s executive director, said. “I will be very glad to not have the problems that other cities have encountered. We’re not going to get it 100 percent right on the first day, but there’s a lot that’s been figured out about bike share in other cities that Philadelphia will learn from and continue to learn from.”
All the details are still getting worked out, primarily by Alison Cohen’s team at Bicycle Transit Systems. She’s helped usher in bike share systems to Australia, Washington, D.C., Boston, and, with notoriously excessive media attention, New York City.
“There were a core group of us that were key to the beginning of all of those systems, and I was able to bring them with me to help form Bicycle Transit Systems,” she said. “We are technically a new company, but if you add up the number of years of experience, it’s more than anyone else in the industry.”
She calls Mount Airy home and said her general manager would be moving to Philadelphia within the next couple months. Over the next year, she’ll start hiring a crew to staff and trouble-shoot the system for the city. In fact, a healthy amount of jobs will be created in the coming year, but in the meantime, she’s focused on building the city’s trust and enthusiasm.
“We’re about a year out now, and we’re going to be able to take the next year to responsibly identify the stations and do the community involvement work that should be done, and get everyone on board prior to the system being launched,” she said.
But the promise of a headquarters is thrilling.
“As contracts get going, we’ll be establishing a warehouse/office/call center headquarters,” Cohen said. “That location is to be determined right now, but we’re going to be establishing our headquarters [here] and hiring a lot of folks to help run the system.”
Though Philadelphians have been frothing at the mouth for an affordable bike share program for years, and there are 32 other bike sharing cities in the U.S. already, the Mayor’s Office of Transportation and Utility’s Andrew Stober is confident in the timeline.
“It’s a six-month timeline to get bikes ordered and stations delivered, and it doesn’t make sense to launch the system in the winter,” he noted. “We think it’s important that we start off with a core network of stations that’s large enough to serve a significant number of trips and then build out from there.”
The hope is that by ’16 there may be as many as 100 stations and 2,000 bikes. And there will be an app that will make sure that one’s closest station has a bike and that one’s destination station is waiting with a dock.
“You can absolutely expect that here,” Stober said.
The bikes themselves are designed by Trek and Trek’s B-Cycle technologies will keep the system functioning smoothly. Bob Burns, B-Cycle’s president, described them as ideal for the sake of transit. They’re modeled on bike share bikes from around the world.
They’ll be “One size fits all with an easily adjustable indexed seat; internal gears in three-speed rear hubs; front and rear lights that are powered by the front hub so they’re always on and stay on after the rider stops in case the rider’s stopped at a red light; baskets for your purse or briefcase or baguette and bottle of wine from the market,” Burns said. “They’re designed to be and do what they do, which is to provide transit a form of public transit.”
The stations should be brand new, as well, tricked out with brand new technologies.
“Philadelphia will be the first city in the world to launch with that station,” Burns said.
Doty and Stober are enthusiastic about the options that bike share will provide, not only for existent bike riders, but also for those seeking affordable transit options. Philadelphia’s will aim to be one of the first to accommodate those without a bank or credit card.
“The credit card requirement is very important for bike share in terms of accountability, but we’re going to create a different means of accountability, and it doesn’t have to be through a credit card,” Cohen explained. “It may be through a local organization that they’re involved in and just because they don’t have a credit card does not mean that they should not be able to use bike share.”
The program will open options for tourists, commuters who round-trip through Suburban Station and lifers alike.
“Bicycling has been consistently growing in Philadelphia over the last decade or more and certainly we’ve seen that in other cities bike share accelerates growing in bicycling,” Doty said. “Particularly for South Philly, I think bicycling is one of the great advantages that South Philly has over the rest of the world. Per capita, it’s one of the most bicycled neighborhoods in the United States.”
Contact Staff Writer Bill Chenevert at bchenevert@southphillyreview.com or ext. 117.
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