Minneapolis's bike-share system has only had two stolen bikes, and not just because people there are Minnesota nice. Theft and vandalism haven't been a problem for any American bike-sharing system. Photo: Kevin Jack via Flickr.

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.

“Theft and vandalism hasn’t been a big problem with either of our two systems,” said Jim Sebastian, who runs Washington D.C.’s bike and pedestrian programs. Under D.C.’s old SmartBike system, which opened in 2008, only one bike was ever stolen, and that was when a rider left it unsecured. Under the new and larger Capital Bikeshare system, which launched in September with about 1,100 bikes, they’ve lost fewer than five bikes, Sebastian said.

“We did have some vandalism at the beginning,” added Sebastian. “People test the limits at first, basically.” That’s died down now that the program is up and running, he said. “There’s nothing that hampers the operation of the system.”

Sebastian said there’s no trick to keeping the bikes safe. “Just making it difficult to get the bikes out of the rack,” is the key, he said.

In Minneapolis, again, theft and vandalism simply haven’t materialized as problems. The operators expected to lose around ten percent of their bikes to crime in the first year, but so far, that figure has only turned out to be 0.3 percent.

With 700 bikes on the streets since June, said Dossett, only two bikes have disappeared. Vandalism has been minimal: There have been a few bikes that were graffitied, a few tires slashed, and one incident in which a motorist hit a bike-sharing station and shattered some glass. “That’s been $5,000 worth of damage,” he said. “I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any system that operates any equipment in the public sphere with that low a damage rate.”

Dossett agreed that good locking mechanisms are key, and also urged New York to create some community pride in the bike-sharing project. “You want people to see this as a local initiative and as something that’s got everybody’s health in mind,” he said. “Then people won’t want to lash out against it.”

The story’s the same in Denver, where bikes are all equipped with a GPS device that can be used for tracking and security purposes. So far there hasn’t been much need to recover stolen bikes. “We’ve had one bike stolen since we launched on April 22,” said Parry Burnap, executive director of Denver Bike Sharing. “One bike damaged, someone tried to scrape the logos off.”

There was also one incident in which a number of bikes had their tires slashed, as did all the cars in the neighborhood. “And that’s it,” said Burnap. “We’ve made no claims on our insurance policy, so that’s really an indicator of the low level of damage we’ve gotten.”

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?

From left: Tom Tancredo, Dan Maes, and John Hickenlooper in a three-way debate in Colorado's gubernatorial election. Image: AP

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.”

His conspiracy theories about bicycles made Maes, a Tea Party favorite, a bit of an easy target for his opponents. He fueled the fire with a series of paranoid statements, each kookier than the last, about the UN plot to subdue America through cycling.

Maes, who got his start in business working in the telecommunications industry before moving on to a credit reporting agency, is more of an oil-and-gas guy. He wants to remove “bureaucratic regulations” that restrict the fossil fuel industry.

Meanwhile, Democratic candidate John Hickenlooper has been fiercely promoting green transportation during his tenure as mayor of Denver. Openly asking questions like, “How do we wean ourselves off automobiles?”, Hickenlooper has championed both biking and transit, building consensus among 32 area mayors for the $6.5 billion FasTracks regional rail and bus expansion project.

Hickenlooper has gotten under the skin of the auto industry by openly plotting the shift away from the single-occupancy vehicle. “This country’s in love with automobiles,” he said in an interview with Grist. “That’s not going to go away quick. But we can give people more options.”

He likens the ascent of biking versus driving to the rapid rise of the cell phone. “If you told people 10 years ago that landlines would disappear as fast as they are, they wouldn’t have believed you.”

And Hickenlooper is very aware of the sea change in people’s desire for urbanism. “People say nobody wants to live in downtowns in Western cities, because people want yards,” he told Grist. “But we built over 25,000 condominiums and homes in downtown Denver in the last 15 years. If you lay [transit] out right, people will change their ways.”

But the 40 percent of the vote Tancredo is commanding points to the fact that for a large part of the Colorado electorate, this election isn’t about energy independence or smart cities. It’s about immigration. Hickenlooper has had to play defense on charges that he’s made Denver a “sanctuary city” for undocumented immigrants.

But whether or not he wins the Minuteman vote, he’s got the bike vote locked up.

Dan Maes: Don't count him out of Colorado gov's race just because he's crazy. Photo: Denver Post

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.

Denver will launch its bike-share system this week with 500 bicycles at 50 stations, aiming to expand to 1,100 bikes in 2011.

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."

Bob Burns, president of B-cycle, at right, shows off a rental station. Photo: Ben Fried

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.

Riders in Dallas, where a public-private partnership could be the ticket to a new expansion. (Photo: JCWinnie.biz)

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:

Dallas City Council member Ron Natinsky urged colleagues to embrace the idea, and said he was ready to vote Thursday.

"There is no downside here," he said. "This simply says we’re going to
solicit bids. Those bids have to be returned, and if they aren’t to our
liking, we can turn them down. And we’re no worse off than we are now."

No matter who is in charge of negotiating the deal, a
privately financed rail line will represent a seismic shift in how
passenger rail is built in Texas, just as Gov. Rick Perry’s pursuit of
privatized toll roads has transformed the way those roads are paid for.

As with toll
road deals, private partners who invest in rail lines would insist that
every service decision – from ticket costs, to station locations, to
schedules and parking fees – be examined with an eye on how much
revenue they could produce. 

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.

You can follow me @naparstek. 

And you can follow other conference attendees at #cnu17.

• 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.
  

Denver's FasTracks transit expansion will add more than 100 miles of rail and BRT service.

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.

Portland, of course, has been the most aggressively pro-urban city in the country for three decades, with its mix of pro-transit, pro-biking policies all set in a state that employs some of the most cohesive growth-management practices in the country. In Portland, as readers of Streetsblog know, you can now ride a bike and have priority over cars when you come to a red light, just like in Amsterdam, the place Brooks posits as the epitome of un-American living. If Americans don't want to be urban, why are they putting Portland in their top ten list?

Essentially all the other cities on this list are pursuing pro-urban policies, even if they aren’t all urban yet. Hell, even Tampa, in the belly of a state that defined suburban sprawl, opened a downtown streetcar line a few years ago.

Before posting this piece, I went back and re-read Brooks' column, just to see if I had gotten everything right or missed anything. Upon review, it's actually astonishing how misleading it is. It's such a textbook example of selectively using facts and figures to advance faulty logic that it's worth doing a blow-by-blow here.

First Brooks starts with an arguably true statement, that many urban planners would like Americans to live in denser, more urban places. Then he condenses that into the hyperbole that urban planners want Americans to live in Amsterdam. This is not quite the case, but it’s okay to over-simplify to make a point and to make a column easier to understand.

But then, having set up this over-simple argument, Brooks goes about arguing that the places where Americans want to live are not Amsterdam. As I think I’ve demonstrated, even going by that absurd criteria, Brooks can’t prove his point. Because Denver, Portland, and other cities on America’s top ten list are moving in the direction of "Amsterdam." Plenty of Americans do “want the Dutch option,” or an American version of it.

Every columnist must at times simply pull one out of the air, using whatever is lying around on the desk. I wonder if this was one of those times with Brooks.