The past two years have undoubtedly been important for the growth of bikeshare in the United States.
New programs sprouted in 82 communities in 2017, and total annual trips grew from 300,000 to 30 million across the country between 2010 and 2016.
Even with all that going on, many eyes have turned towards new players in the dockless-bikeshare space that hope to increase ridership by still more orders of magnitude.
The waves these companies are making led to a standing-room session at this past weekend’s TransportationCamp DC 2018 in Arlington, Va.
Ryan Rzepecki from the electric dockless bikeshare company Jump, which is part of Social Bicycles, led a discussion on whether or not the dockless wave is a fad or the future.
Many points that Rzepecki and participants made settled into three categories that will influence the future of dockless – and perhaps all – bikeshare over the long term.
The author (right) with fellow TransportationCampers
Economic sustainability and differentiation
Much like ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft, dockless companies currently subsist on a flood of venture capital and must find a path to profitability to survive. This is a pressure that traditional, publicly subsidized systems like Washington, D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare don’t necessarily face. That said, Rzepecki pointed out that it takes a lot of bad spending to burn through hundreds of millions of dollars – except in rare circumstances, such as Uber’s ability to seemingly spend endlessly.
It’s likely that most of these companies will begin to shut down as they run out of capital, leaving one or two to dominate local markets, at which point they may be able to turn a profit. Rzepecki expects electric bikes, like his Jump, to win out in this realm by fully differentiating themselves as higher-quality and easier-to-use alternatives to the other options currently on the market.
Geometry
Fixed bikeshare requires a certain density of stations to succeed. Otherwise, people won’t want or be able to ride between the stations that exist. There’s a certain level of reliability that dockless bikes will need to be able to complement fuller fixed bikeshare systems. LimeBike’s founder, for example, put a number on it recently, envisioning that relatively small (in land size) D.C. would need 20,000 bikes to saturate the market.
Jump e-bikes especially provide a strong anecdotal example. People tend not to consider e-bikeshare when they are riding with other people because they don’t expect more than one bike to be reasonably close by. There are still very few Jumps available on D.C.’s streets.
Whether reality or perception, companies need to scale to the point that dockless bikes feel ubiquitous and readily available for riders to be able to easily access them.
TransportationCampers take a break with a game of Cards Against Urbanity
Also, dockless bikeshares are now taking up more space on already-taxed curbs and sidewalks. The struggle over who gets to put what in the public right of way is not likely to end any time soon.
Jump, at least, has come up with an answer to these concerns over “bike litter” by requiring riders to lock their bikes to racks, compared to the free-standing nature of their competitors that allows riders to get creative with their parking, which has of course already spawned a Twitter account.
Jump’s approach, however, does further limit rack space for personal bike owners, further crowding a limited infrastructure commodity. This may lead to resistance not from normal anti-bike types, but from cyclists themselves who already feel squeezed by the limited parking space cities provide for them. This led the TransportationCamp discussion to the biggest and most over-arching issue:
Cultural buy-in
Both economic viability and spatial challenges influence and are influenced by whether or not society accepts this new model.
Rzepecki highlighted China, where the dockless boom occurred about a year prior to the U.S.’s current one. There, the public, station-based systems languished on the periphery of society. Yet when Ofo and Mobike dropped their bikes onto city streets, residents started using them almost immediately. Within one year, China’s major cities ended up with millions of freestanding bikes.
Some American cities are looking at a similar trend. Seattle’s publicly funded station-based system called Pronto, though an extreme example, shut down after just two-and-a-half years of operation due to underwhelming ridership.
Soon after crews removed Pronto’s stations, Spin, LimeBike, and Ofo introduced their bikes to the city. As of December, they had already surpassed 1 million rides, compared to fewer than 300,000 for Pronto through its whole lifespan.
Similar to in China, Rzepecki emphasized the rapid cultural uptake of this model, which proponents argue is far more inviting to customers. Even in D.C., there are early signs that dockless bikes have already done a much better job at diversifying bicycling culture than Capital Bikeshare has accomplished. The belief so far is that this is due to a less cumbersome user interface and flexible distribution that brings more bikes to Wards 7 and 8, which are notoriously underserved by many city services.
So is this enough to propel bikeshare into a dockless future?
The TransportationCamp crowd seemed to agree that bikesharing will likely continue to trend in this direction. This same group, though, doesn’t seem to think that the evolution will stop with the iterations currently on the road, and industry contributors like Rzepecki sound excited about what these services could look like as they continue to address markets in new ways.
See more notes from the dockless bikeshare session here and notes to many of the other TransportationCamp sessions here.
Photos by M.V. Jantzen. More of his TransportationCamp photos are here. Bikeshare photo by Daniel Lobo/Flickr.