Streetsblog New York City

Compared to other things eating up parking spaces -- new curb cuts, parking placards -- bike-share will be tiny. Data sources and methodology available in this spreadsheet

Bike-share, no doubt, is going to be a major addition to the streets of New York — in terms of both impact and visibility. Within the service area, there’s going to be a station every few blocks. And some of those stations are going to have a lot of bicycle docks: 59 in many locations, and a whopping 118 next to Grand Central. Thanks to the small footprint of bikes, however, overall this new form of transit will consume relatively little space while allowing people to make tens of thousands of trips per day.

Much of the discussion of bike-share’s size involves the number of parking spots the system will displace, and with the release of the draft service area map last week, it’s possible to estimate how much car parking will give way to bike-share stations. (“How Many Parking Spaces Will CitiBike Share Gobble Up?” went the Gothamist headline yesterday.) But some perspective is in order: Only a fraction of the proposed bike-share stations will remove parking spaces, and those are clustered in neighborhoods where community boards specifically requested that the docks stay off their already-crowded sidewalks.

Of the 420 stations scheduled to open this year, only 157 replace car parking — a little more than one in three. (To run the numbers we used Gothamist’s spreadsheet of Manhattan bike-share locations and added our own count of stations in Brooklyn and Queens slated to replace parking. You can download Streetsblog’s spreadsheet with that information and all the math in this post.) Most bike-share stations are slated for on-street locations that don’t take away parking, on sidewalks, in parks and public plazas, or on private property. That 118-dock station near Grand Central, for example, will be in a no-parking zone of Park Avenue.

More importantly, the bike-share system will provide far more total transportation capacity in that curbside space than automobile parking does. Bike-share will eliminate 623 on-street parking spaces, according to Streetsblog calculations (one parallel parking space takes up around 22 feet of curbside space; bike-share can fit four docks — or three docks and a payment kiosk — in ten feet). In those spots will be 5,320 new bike-share parking spaces: eight and a half times as many.

To put it differently, you could fit a 39-dock station in just five parking spaces. Bikes are simply a lot smaller than automobiles, and the space it takes to store one car can hold a lot more bikes.

The rate of turnover gives bike-share another big advantage over car parking.

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A map of the coming bike-share system with circles scaled to represent the size of stations. Image: Steven Romalewski

Hungry for more bike-share maps? Yeah, us too. Thanks to Steven Romalewski, the director of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Mapping Service, we’ve got our fix.

In a post on his Spatiality blog, Romalewski uses GIS to analyze the 413 bike-share stations posted on DOT’s website so far. One map, shown above, shows each station with the size of the station displayed graphically. At a glance, you can see the number of docks per station decrease as you move away from employment centers and subway lines, or into Brooklyn and Queens. For an interactive version, click here.

Romalewski also found that the locations of the bike-share stations tracked the map of the subway system relatively closely — no surprise, since that’s where the density, destinations and demand are. Half of all stations are within one avenue block of a subway station, according to his analysis. Only 21 stations are more than a half-mile from the subway (the furthest is on the Hudson River Greenway, four avenues from the Port Authority).

In this map, the size of the circles marking bike-share stations represent the proximity to a subway station. Image: Steven Romalewski

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Factoring in proximity to bike lanes, street connectivity, topography, and commuter cycling rates, the Bike Score algorithm rated Minneapolis America's most bikeable city. Image: Walk Score

The people behind Walk Score, the real estate rating service that goes by the slogan “Drive Less, Live More,” are out with a new rating system, based on hard data, that should prove useful to prospective city dwellers: Bike Score.

The company launched the Bike Score website today, using its new algorithm to rank the ten most bikeable cities in the country. (We covered their release of city rankings for transit last month.) Minneapolis ran away with the top prize with a 79 percent bikeability rating. San Francisco tied Portland for number two, despite the fact that hilliness was a factor. D.C. and New York also placed highly (while the NYC core rates very highly on Bike Score, the bike lane deserts outside the center city score quite low).

The staff of Walk Score is made up of a whole lot of bike commuters. No wonder they were excited to launch a new bikeability ranking. Photo courtesy of Walk Score

In other bikeability rating news, the League of American Bicyclists released its 2012 list of Bicycle Friendly Communities today. There’s a lot of overlap between the BFCs and the Bike Score winners, but they are compiled use vastly different methodologies. For one thing, you won’t find two of the League’s top three cycling cities on the Bike Score list because Bike Score, so far, only looks at cities with populations over 200,000. Sorry, Boulder and Davis.

Colorado and Montana did well in the League’s rankings this year. Missoula and Durango moved up to gold, and the Colorado towns of Gunnison and Aspen made it onto the list for the first year, rolling in at the silver level. Look for your city on their updated BFC list [PDF].

The League bases its BFC choices on somewhat subjective criteria. They look for the “five Es”: engineering, education, encouragement, evaluation & planning, and enforcement. Decisions are made by staff and external reviewers, in consultation with local stakeholders.

Bike Score, on the other hand, is based on pure numbers. Individual addresses are rated on a scale of 0-100 based on four factors:

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Bike-share stations will be densely spaced, meaning a bike is never more than a few blocks away within the service area. Image: NYC DOT

Putting 420 big blue dots on a map of New York really crystallizes what had been abstract so far: Bike-share is going to blanket the core of the city. If you live, work, study, or socialize in Manhattan below 60th Street or northwest Brooklyn, there’s going to be a station within a few blocks of your apartment, your office, your subway stop, your favorite cafe or that out-of-the-way gallery you’ve been meaning to check out.

Within the service area — which will include ten stations in Long Island City from the outset — there’s pretty much a consistent grid of stations, meaning ready access from just about anywhere. The station density is higher in some places (check out Washington Square) and lower in others (Midtown is a bit sparser than downtown), but essentially there’s nowhere without good coverage.

The one major exception is insular south Williamsburg, where local Hasidic leaders have fought bike infrastructure and complained about the mere presence of cyclists. There, a square of more than half a mile in each direction is entirely without a station. Other gaps exist — there aren’t any stations on the narrow streets of Little Italy, for example — but outside of south Williamsburg’s Satmar neighborhood none seems large enough to really impede the use of the system.

DOT has also released a map [PDF] showing how far bike-share will extend once fully deployed next year. As previously reported, the system will extend north to 79th Street in Manhattan and south toward Prospect Park in Brooklyn, as well as a few more blocks deeper into Queens:

Bike-share will expand out to its full size of 10,000 bikes and 600 stations by next spring. Image: NYC DOT

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City Council Speaker Christine Quinn admires the new "Citi Bike" with Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. Photo: Paul Steely White

Looks like Streetsblog readers and corporate CEOs aren’t the only ones excited about bike-share. After today’s big announcement, which included not only the branding of bike-share but also new details about the pricing and rollout of the program, the glowing reactions started to pour into our inbox. Here’s what we’re hearing:

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn didn’t participate in this morning’s presser, but she did stop by, pose with a new royal blue “Citi Bike” and declare her support for the program. “Citi Bike will give New Yorkers and the 50 million tourists who visit New York each year a healthy, green way to navigate the city,” Quinn said in an email. “I thank Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Sadik-Khan for bringing a bike share program to New York City and for working closely with members of the council and local community boards to identify suitable sites for placement.”

“I’m thrilled to have this in New York,” she told the Wall Street Journal, noting that she’d seen the success of bike-share in other cities. “I love the blue,” added the speaker. “It’s a good color for me.”

Advocacy groups, too, cheered the announcement, including the Municipal Art Society, one of the city’s most venerable urban planning organizations. “MAS sees tremendous potential in New York City’s bike share program,” said president Vin Cipolla. “In addition to increasing mobility, bike share will help introduce people to active transportation, alleviate pressure on transit, provide a quicker connection between transit stops and final destinations, and reduce the number of short auto trips.”

“Today’s sponsor announcement marks a major step toward fulfilling the immense latent demand in New York City for bicycling,” said Transportation Alternatives Executive Director Paul Steely White. “Soon, New Yorkers will have a new transportation choice to add to our diverse menu of options for getting around town. It’s no surprise that New Yorkers overwhelmingly support public bike share. As soon as it hits the streets this summer, NYC Bike Share will empower us all with new freedom and convenience in our daily transportation routines.”

Since the September 2011 selection of Alta Bikeshare to run the sytem, bike-share has earned endorsements from such unlikely bedfellows as Partnership for New York City CEO Kathy Wylde and Working Families Party Executive Director Dan Cantor, as well as numerous City Council members.

The line-up at today's bike-share presser: Deputy Mayor Robert Steel, Alta Bikeshare CEO Alison Cohen, NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga, and Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit. Photo: Noah Kazis

The largest bike-share system in North America will be sponsored by one of the world’s largest financial institutions. At City Hall today, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a $41 million, five-year sponsorship arrangement with Citigroup that will fund most of the cost of implementing NYC’s bike-share network. The system will go by the name “Citi Bike,” and its distinctive blue bikes will be available in late July, with the full 10,000-bike, 600-station network in place by spring 2013.

MasterCard, putting in $6.5 million, will be the secondary sponsor. Its logo will appear on all the station kiosks, where bike-share users can sign up by swiping their credit cards. The sponsorship announcement clears up the last big unknown about how the system would be funded. After the initial capital investment in setting up the system, the city and operator Alta Bikeshare expect Citi Bike to turn an operational profit.

It was also an occasion to see how much it pleased the chiefs of two large multi-national corporations to associate their brands with bike-share. “We could not do what we do” without New York City’s infrastructure, Citi CEO Vikram Pandit told the assembled reporters, calling bike-share “an innovative option, kind of like ZipCar,” but “better for the environment and it’s also good exercise.” Said MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga, ”The bike-share program is just another way to continue that ‘priceless’ New York feeling.”

Announcing that the timetable for launching the full 10,000-bike system will extend into spring 2013, Bloomberg said, “You’re getting an entirely new transportation system without spending any taxpayer dollars.”

About two-thirds of the system — 420 stations — will be available soon after the July launch, according to the Citi Bike website, with “parts of the Upper West and East Sides, and Park Slope, Prospect Heights and Crown Heights” getting stations by next spring. DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said that Long Island City, Queens will also be included in the system. “It’s going to be a phased deployment,” she said.

The full system map will be available later this week, Bloomberg said, the result of copious online feedback and 250 meetings with community boards, BIDs, and other stakeholders. If any location doesn’t work out at first, he added, the solar-powered kiosks are easy to pick up and move elsewhere without construction.

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The Atlantic Yards site may still have a giant surface parking lot at one end, but it will hold half as many cars as previously stated. Unfortunately, promised indoor bike parking has been put off until an unspecified future date. Photosimulation: Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council/Jonathan Barkey

When Brooklyn’s Barclays Center opens with a Jay-Z concert this September, it will be one of the most transit-accessible arenas in the United States. But as Streetsblog has noted before, the transportation planning for the stadium is excessively car-oriented. Developer Forest City Ratner had been planning to build an 1,100-space surface parking lot, marring the pedestrian environment and inducing more driving to the stadium. As opening day nears, there’s good news and bad when it comes to parking.

The bad news first: Forest City no longer plans to keep its much-touted promise to build a staffed indoor bike parking facility in time for the arena opening. Instead, for the foreseeable future, the bike parking will consist of plain outdoor bike racks.

In the December 2009 Atlantic Yards Amended Memorandum of Environmental Concerns, Forest City promised to implement a number of measures “prior to the opening of the arena” to encourage people to leave their cars at home when traveling to the Barclays Center. One of the commitments the developer made was to “provide any ticketholder traveling to the arena by bicycle with free indoor bicycle storage in a secure, manned facility designed to accommodate at least 400 bicycles on the arena block.”

That bike parking, Streetsblog has learned, won’t be available for opening day or anything close to it. Arana Hankin, the director of the Atlantic Yards project for Empire State Development, said in an e-mail that while there will still be room for 400 bikes at the arena, it will be provided via outdoor bike racks for the foreseeable future. The bike parking will be indoors once the project’s “Building 3,” located at the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and Dean Street, is complete, at which point it will be located in the basement, Hankin said.

There’s currently no public timeline for the construction of Building 3, and Hankin didn’t respond to a Streetsblog inquiry about when the building might be complete. Right now, construction is only scheduled for one non-arena building, at the corner of Flatbush and Dean.

With the larger Atlantic Yards project stalled, it’s impossible to say when the promised bike parking will be provided, except to say not any time soon.

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TA's bikenyc.org

Today is the first day of Bike Month 2012, and Transportation Alternatives has launched a comprehensive web site to make sure you don’t miss a thing.

At bikenyc.org you can plan your month with day-by-day event listings, and plan your routes with a Ride the City map. Best part: The site will be around when May is over, too.

Before and after: Sidewalk on Marshall Avenue, St. Paul. Source: Bike Walk Twin Cities

If you ever doubted whether a small investment in biking and walking could have a large impact, here is your proof.

The last transportation law, SAFETEA-LU, provided four communities with four years of funding to build an infrastructure network for nonmotorized transportation (a fancy way of saying “sidewalks and bike paths”). It wasn’t a lot of money — $25 million each to Columbia, Missouri; Marin County, California; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Sheboygan County, Wisconsin.

The program built 333 miles of on-street biking and walking routes, 23 of off-street facilities, and 5,727 bike parking spaces in the four municipalities — not to mention some outreach and education. Not bad, especially when you consider that $100 million would only buy about five miles of new four-lane highway in an urbanized area [PDF].

Total two-hour bicycling and walking counts for all pilot communities, fall 2007 and fall 2010. Source: FHWA Report to the U.S. Congress on the Outcomes of the Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program

FHWA summed up the results in its report on the outcomes of the pilot program [PDF]:
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The general shape of the pricing scheme for New York’s bike-share system – an annual membership cheaper than a monthly Metrocard, according to the early buzz from DOT – has been floating out there for a while. Now, with the system set to go live in July, the details are starting to get nailed down.

Speaking at the New Amsterdam Bicycle Show last weekend, DOT policy director Jon Orcutt revealed the current thinking on how much it’ll cost to use one of the 10,000 public bicycles soon to appear on the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Doug Gordon moderated the discussion, and he’s got the info on his blog:

• An annual membership will cost $95.
• A one-day membership will cost $10.
• The first 45 minutes of any ride will incur no additional charges to annual members beyond the initial subscription fee.
• Lower membership levels, such as one-day and multi-day options, will have a shorter “free” ride limit: 30 minutes.

As Gordon notes, nothing’s set in stone until the system goes into operation. Also, both Washington, D.C. and Boston have offered online deals to price-conscious consumers who passed on the first wave of sign-ups.

New Yorkers anxious for bike-share to move from concept to reality should be getting an even bigger treat shortly. The preliminary map of all 600 station locations is expected to be posted online in the very near future.