It hasn’t been long that dockless bikeshare systems have been released onto the streets of Seattle, Washington, D.C., and some other U.S. cities. And already, they’re driving up interest in taking the healthiest mobility and commuting option imaginable.
Dockless leaders think it might not be long before as much as 10 percent of the population in several cities is biking as their main commuting style.
Toby Sun, chief executive of the start-up LimeBike, which launched on a North Carolina college campus in May and is now in 18 U.S. cities, said private bike rentals can change the way mainstream populations use bikes for daily transportation and help cities improve planning and infrastructure building.
“We expect that in 2018, as developments in additional bike technology begin to enter the mainstream bike-share market, this proliferation will only get more robust,” he said. “We hope to bring bike traffic in the U.S. from less than 1 percent to more than 10 percent.”
“Something about this new business model, something about the dollar ride is very attractive to people that weren’t riding before,” said Gabe Klein, a former transportation chief in the District and Chicago. “The bike market could triple or quadruple.”
Advocates and transportation officials agree that the dockless systems have the potential to significantly boost bike travel. The systems are available in more than 20 U.S. cities, including Seattle, Dallas and Washington, and on a dozen college campuses.
The addition of thousands of bikes to U.S. streets in just six months is only the first step, proponents say, in making them a more attractive option for commuting as has happened in major European cities.
In D.C., for example, the share of bike commuters jumped from just over 1 percent in 2000 to nearly 5 percent today.
“With dockless bikeshare we can hit 10 percent by 2022,” said Klein, who helped launch the city’s first bike-sharing program, Capital Bikeshare, in 2010. The service has since expanded regionwide.
Big cities such as Washington that already run successful bike-share programs can benefit from extra bikes in areas with high demand or where docked stations aren’t available. But the biggest positive impact might be in municipalities that have struggled to fund bike-share systems.
“For Seattle it was impossible to get public money for so we had to try a different way,” said Scott Kubly, director of the Seattle Department of Transportation.
Seattle was the first major U.S. city to open its market to the dockless companies this summer. The city had struggled to sustain its own bike-sharing system, canceling it in March because of low ridership and political challenges. That’s when it began to craft a permit system that is now being replicated in cities across the country to allow the dockless bike-sharing start-ups to operate.
In just a few months, Seattle’s bike fleet went from 500 bikes in the failed program to more than 7,000 dockless bicycles. Its riding record of 0.7 trips per bike daily rose to 2.56 trips per bike per day, putting the city behind only New York in terms of usage, officials said.
The new model, Kubly said, has been more effective in attracting a larger cross-section of riders, from millennials to retirees and minorities.
To see more articles like this, subscribe to the Mobility Lab Daily Newsletter.