Streetsblog New York City

Even as bike-sharing spreads across the United States, it remains dogged by one persistent doubt. Critics, and even some boosters, fear that the bikes will be routinely stolen and vandalized. It’s time to stop worrying about crime, however. In America’s new bike-sharing systems, there have been essentially no such problems.

Fears that public bikes will be abused can be traced to Paris’s Vélib system, which while wildly popular has struggled with high levels of theft and vandalism. Take Michael Grynbaum’s write-up last week of New York City’s bike-share plans in the Times, where crime is portrayed as the only downside:

In Paris, the pioneer of bike-sharing, the bikes are used up to 150,000 times a day. But there has also been widespread theft and vandalism; bicycles have ended up tossed in the Seine, dangling from lampposts and shipped off to northern Africa for illegal sale.

The scenes of Vélib bike abuse replicate descriptions widely circulated in a 2009 BBC story about the system’s troubles. The problems with Vélib are real, if overhyped by the media. In 2009, JCDecaux, the advertising agency that runs Vélib, estimated that over 8,000 bikes were stolen and another 8,000 rendered unrideable and irreparable. It was a problem that had to be addressed.

Luckily for the rest of the world, it seems to have been an easy fix for other cities. Many now believe that the locking mechanism at Vélib’s stations was poorly designed. Systems that use a different method have successfully controlled theft to the point where the cost is negligible.

Vélib bikes lock on the side of the frame, as seen here. Other operators, including ClearChannel, B-cycle and the Public Bike System, have had dramatically lower rates of theft and use a different locking method, explained Bill Dossett, who runs Minneapolis’s new NiceRide bike-sharing system. “The ClearChannel systems had the locking mechanism built into the headset,” where the handlebars meet the bicycle frame, “and just has never had the same problems,” he said.

For example, Barcelona’s Bicing system, run by ClearChannel, has had about one-fifth the rate of stolen public bikes as Vélib, despite higher theft rates citywide, according to the New York Department of City Planning.

Stateside, the problems with crime have been smaller still.

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This is the third installment of Streetsblog Capitol Hill’s series on key governor’s races. Earlier we brought you stories about a candidate who likes bikes but isn’t sure about transit in Tennessee, and the choice between light rail and bus rapid transit in Maryland. Here we turn our attention to Colorado.

Colorado is a classic swing state. Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by a margin of just 3.5 percent. The state voted for Obama in 2008, the first time it went blue in a presidential contest since Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. And before that, you had to go all the way back to LBJ.

But now this purple state may be losing its red. Gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes’ trainwreck of a campaign could leave the GOP a minor party in the state of Colorado. Could it have something to do with his bizarre allegations that bike-sharing in Denver is a UN plot? Or his zeal to de-regulate the oil and gas industries?

As Talking Points Memo reported yesterday, if Maes fails to attract just 10 percent of the votes next Tuesday, the GOP will be saddled with minor party status in Colorado until 2014. A recent Denver Post poll shows him at 9 percent. The Democratic-affiliated PPP poll gives him just 5 percent. Minor party status would leave the GOP at a serious disadvantage by limiting their fundraising and ceding their spot at the top of the ballot.

That doesn’t mean Democrat John Hickenlooper will just cruise into the governor’s mansion though. American Constitution Party candidate Tom Tancredo (formerly a Republican member of Congress) is making this race a contest, with Hickenlooper ahead by about 6 percent, according to the polling average cited on Real Clear Politics. They’re competing for the seat being vacated by Democrat Bill Ritter, who was rated the country’s greenest governor last year.

Tancredo is too singularly obsessed with immigration to talk much about transportation or environmental issues. But not Maes.

“This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed,” he said in August of Denver’s bike-sharing program, which Hickenlooper had helped to launch as the city’s mayor. “This is bigger than it looks like on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms.”

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The Colorado governor's race was always going to be one for sustainable transportation advocates to keep an eye on. The likely Democratic nominee, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, has built a solid resume of support for transit and bicycling. But recent events suggest the green transportation/livable streets stakes may be waaaaay higher than expected.

It turns out that Dan Maes, an insurgent with Tea Party cred vying for the GOP nomination, already has his sights trained on Hickenlooper's transportation initiatives and their sinister origins.

The week after Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Hickenlooper, and a few other guys in suits saddled up to try out Denver's new bike-share system, B-Cycle, Maes weighed in on what this advance in transportation really means. Read all about the paranoia in the Denver Post:

Maes is warning voters that Hickenlooper's policies, particularly his efforts to boost bike riding, are "converting Denver into a United Nations community."

"This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed," Maes told about 50 supporters who showed up at a campaign rally last week in Centennial.

Maes said in a later interview that he once thought the mayor's efforts to promote cycling and other environmental initiatives were harmless and well-meaning. Now he realizes "that's exactly the attitude they want you to have."

"This is bigger than it looks like on the surface, and it could threaten our personal freedoms," Maes said.

I work in the shadow of UN global headquarters and, being an enterprising journalist, I've seen a draft of this plan. It goes like this: First they lull you into submission with the public bikes. Then they nullify the Bill of Rights, outlaw the English language, and strip away your American citizenship. Then they seize your SUV.

Anyway... Before you dismiss Maes as a fringe character who just showed too much of his crazy side to gain statewide public office, consider this. Three days ago he was edging out his competition in the race for the GOP nomination. If he's elected, he'll basically control Colorado DOT's billion-dollar annual budget. So, all you global government-supporting bike riders out there, there's no guarantee this will be a laughing matter in November.

Earth Day is coming around the bend, and cities are timing their new green initiatives to coincide with the public's heightened eco-consciousness. Here's one we're partial to: In Denver, Mayor John Hickenlooper and city leaders are using the occasion to launch their 500-bicycle, 50-station bike-share system. It will be the largest bike-share system in the U.S. until Minneapolis and Boston roll theirs out later this spring.

While Minneapolis and Boston selected the company behind Montreal's Bixi to run their bike-share systems, Denver went with B-cycle, a joint venture between Trek Bicycles, health insurer Humana, and PR firm Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. B-cycle had a demo station set up at Pier 84 on the Hudson River Greenway yesterday, where I had the chance to talk to company president Bob Burns about how the system works.

In Denver, B-cycle will be financed by ads and user subscriptions, with annual memberships priced at $65. Members get RFID cards that they can use to to check out bicycles at individual docks with a wave of the hand. The first 30 minutes of each ride are free, with each additional hour priced at one dollar.

The stations can run on solar or A/C power. Denver has chosen to place their kiosks in plazas and other pedestrian spaces, not in parking lanes like they do in Paris.

One of the interesting features that distinguishes B-cycle is its tracking system. Each bike is equipped with a GPS unit, so users can access their member profiles online and see where they biked, how far they rode, and how many calories they burned. The cumulative GPS data from the entire system should also prove to be a valuable resource for transportation planners. "It gives cities a lot of information on where cyclists are going and which routes are being used," said Burns. "They can make more intelligent decisions about where to invest in infrastructure."

Buoyed by Ray LaHood's recent statements of support for bicycle infrastructure, Burns was appropriately bullish, for a bike-share exec, on the future of bike-share in American cities. "Once people see it can happen and that it can work, and people in those cities appreciate it," he said, "we think it's gonna explode."

Denver bike-share firm B-cycle has set up a demo station at Pier 84 on the Hudson River Greenway. Reps should be there until around 5:00 today.

B-cycle is a cooperative of Humana, Trek, and PR firm Crispin Porter + Bogusky. On Thursday it will launch a 500-bike program, billed as "the first city-wide bike-sharing system in the U.S.," in Denver.

The House transportation committee is holding a hearing today on "innovative financing" for infrastructure projects — a topic near and dear to lawmakers who continue to hunt for a politically feasible, sustainable strategy for funding a new six-year federal transport bill.

Meanwhile, in the Denver and Dallas metro areas, planners are edging toward public-private partnership agreements to pay for new rail lines, a prospect all but ruled out in a November analysis by the Government Accountability Office that cast significant doubt on the potential for private-sector transit funding.

Denver officials hope to accomplish the tricky feat of wooing private capital to transit by executing a deal directing sales-tax revenue to the winning bidder, which would provide immediate financing and collect operating profits. From yesterday’s Dow Jones report:

Denver’s transit agency hopes to skirt the dilemma by using a portion of its
dedicated sales-tax revenue to essentially lease the completed rail lines,
vehicles and maintenance facility from the winning investment group under a 40-year agreement, in exchange for the up-front investment and ongoing operation.

If the plan comes to fruition, the agency will maintain ownership of the
project and control over fares, but provide the investors with a profitable,
long-term revenue stream…

The arrangement, known as "availability financing," is relatively commonplace
in Europe but has been used only rarely in the U.S., where privatization of
public infrastructure and services in general has been much slower to catch on.

In Dallas, the local transit agency is weighing a plan to expedite construction of a new rail line with no upfront contribution from the public. The proposed link between Fort Worth and Wylie, Texas, known as the "Cotton Belt," would be paid for using "value capture" taxation methods that aim to harness the economic benefits of rail for local businesses.

But as the Dallas Morning News noted last week, the new financing pitch "would most likely include much steeper fares for the Cotton Belt [and] paid parking." From Michael Lindenberger’s local report on the transit expansion:

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A little end-of-day action from the Streetsblog Flickr pool, courtesy of BeyondDC: Here's Denver's 16th Street Shuttle, also called the MallRide. Check out those three low-floor doors for easy-on, easy-off boarding and alighting.

The MallRide travels up and down a mile-long pedestrian mall -- the only vehicle allowed there -- arriving every 90 seconds. It's also integrated into Denver's light rail system, connecting with all five lines. Oh yeah, and it's free.

BeyondDC also shared a pic of a nicely landscaped contraflow bike lane in nearby Boulder, which comes after the jump. To contribute to our photo pool, add the "Streetsblog" tag to your Flickr submissions.

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OK. I've finally succumbed to Twitter and I'm using it to keep track of interesting quotes, observations and tidbits at the 17th annual Congress for the New Urbanism conference in Denver. There's a lot of great stuff happening here and plenty of interesting people. I'm not sure how much of that I can convey in 140 character text bursts. But I'm a professional haikuist so let's see what I can do.

You can follow me @naparstek. 

And you can follow other conference attendees at #cnu17.

For those who are not tuning in to the American Idol season finale tonight (Kris is going to win, watch), here are two shows worth looking out for:

• PBS's Blueprint America series will be airing "Road to the Future" tonight at 8pm in New York City. Check your local PBS station for times. Part of a PBS series on the country’s aging and changing infrastructure, the documentary examines the choices we can make as the country invests in its infrastructure, and how they can affect the way we live. Focusing in on three cities, New York, Denver and Portland, it features interviews with a whole host of interesting subjects including NYC DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Portland Mayor Sam Adams, BikePortland blog maestro Jonathan Maus and Columbia University's Owen Gutfreund, author of "20th Century Sprawl." It should be a good one. Check their web site for a preview.
  
• I've also been told that the 11 pm10 pm local news on Fox channel 5 is going to run a report tonight on a Brooklyn resident named Miguel Padro who was arrested the other day for bicycling on the sidewalk on his way to work at the Prospect Park Tennis Center. I haven't spoken with Padro yet to get the story for myself, but word has it the NYPD held him in jail for 24 hours without a phone call despite the fact that he had no oustanding summonses or any problems with his record. Padro's wife and employer were really shaken up by the arrest and worried that he'd been kidnapped or killed. It sounds like a completely insane story but given the NYPD's increasingly random, senseless crackdowns on bicyclists it is entirely believable. I'm looking forward to seeing the Fox News piece and talking to Padro for myself before getting too worked up about this.
  

Ben Fried got it exactly right about the errors that riddled Tuesday's David Brooks column. Brooks was so far off the mark, though, that it's worth another look at the ways he misled readers.

The core of his argument that Americans don’t like cities rested on this survey by Pew Research Center. The survey found that Americans, when asked where they would most like to move to, named Denver, San Diego, Seattle, San Francisco, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, Orlando, Tampa and San Antonio as their top ten, in that order of preference. Because these cities are mostly in the west and the south, Brooks concluded that Americans are interested in living in, well, the west and the south. But then he went further, citing it as general evidence of America’s anti-urban tastes.

What Brooks didn't address -- and which I have a hard time believing he didn’t know, given his usual informedness -- was that most of the 10 cities in the poll are pursuing pro-urban agendas with a vengeance. They are building lots of light rail lines. They are re-configuring streets to make them more walkable and bikeable. They are steering clear of policies and projects that would encourage more driving.

Nowhere is that more true than Denver, the number one city in the poll, which supplied the headline to Brooks' column, "I Dream of Denver." Well, a few years ago, this object of American aspirations voted to approve what is probably the largest new mass transit system in the United States. The city of Denver and a bunch of neighboring political jurisdictions managed to come together and agree to build a half dozen light rail and commuter rail lines at once. The metro area will end up with a complete rail-based transit system in one fell swoop, without having to proceed line-by-line over decades, like most cities.

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