Streetsblog New York City

One of these bike-share workshop participants is the star of this classic Streetfilm.

It was another evening of hands-on bike-share station planning at Manhattan Community Board 2 last night, as New Yorkers hunched over maps of SoHo and Greenwich Village, marking the best places to site bike-share kiosks.

If you live or work in the bike-share service area, you really ought to mark your calendar for the station planning meeting in your neck of the woods. There’s something very gratifying about the process that NYC DOT and Alta Bikeshare have put together for people to rate different sites. Each time you put a sticker on the map, you’re shaping the bike-share system in a small but tangible way.

The other thing is that you never know who else will show up. Last night, former Talking Heads frontman and one-time Summer Streets spokesperson David Byrne was in the house, marking up a map. If the pattern holds, it looks like Jay-Z will be on hand for the Manhattan CB 6 workshop later this month, and John Franco and John Starks might turn up at Brooklyn CB 2.

People who live and work in Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen hard at work identifying where they'd like to see bike-share stations. Photo: Noah Kazis

Residents of Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea packed into a room last night to discuss the more than 50 bike-share stations planned to open in their neighborhoods this summer. No one was there to complain — this crowd was there to roll up their sleeves and get to work.

I sat in with a table of nine, where participants uniformly supported bike-share and overwhelmingly believed that the stations should go in parking spaces rather than on crowded Midtown sidewalks. With little disagreement over those broader questions, they dove right into a table-sized map of the area, picking out sites that would and wouldn’t work well for stations.

The workshop, sponsored by Community Board 4, local elected officials and NYC DOT, kicked off with brief overviews from DOT staff of how bike-share works. Streetsblog has already covered most of that, but there were a few new tidbits of information. The Bronx, Queens and Staten Island will each have a small, satellite bike-share system, for example, opening a bit later than the core service area in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Annual members, who would mostly be residents, might also get to take the bikes out longer without paying a surcharge than the tourists purchasing daily or weekly passes.

Everyone at the table I observed was excited to see bike-share come to their neighborhood, so long as the stations are mainly placed in the street. Photo: Noah Kazis

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New Yorkers submitted dozens of suggestions for bike-share station locations in Chelsea alone. Next week, local residents are invited to a Community Board 4 meeting to determine where stations will go. Image: NYC DOT

When bike-share launches this summer, 10,000 new public bicycles will be available at 600 stations in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The stations will typically be located about 1,000 feet apart from each other, ensuring a quick walk to a public bike from anywhere below 79th Street and in northwest Brooklyn. The exact location of the stations — this corner or that one, on the street or on the sidewalk — is largely up to each neighborhood to decide. The hyper-local planning begins next week at a workshop for the Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen neighborhoods [PDF] and continues throughout the service area over the next two months.

Last fall, DOT officials said that public comments will help determine where to place bike-share stations. Community boards can say “the following locations are ‘hell no’ for whatever reasons,” DOT Policy Director Jon Orcutt told Manhattan CB 2 last October. The stations have to be spaced appropriately and follow certain guidelines — no stations on narrow sidewalks or in parking spaces on busy avenues, for example — but within those constraints locals will get to choose where the bikes go.

Next Tuesday, the city’s first bike-share planning workshop will take place. Hosted by Manhattan Community Board 4, State Senator Tom Duane and Assembly Member Richard Gottfried, the event will be an important opportunity for people who live or work in Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen to help shape this significant addition to the New York City streetscape. The difference between a bike-share system where most stations are on the sidewalk and one where most stations are in the curbside lane may be determined at these meetings, for example.

After Tuesday’s meeting, the next workshop will be the following week and cover Manhattan Community Board 2′s district: SoHo, Tribeca and the West Village. For a full and up-to-date listing of the workshops, including time and location, head over to DOT’s bike-share timeline.

Earlier today we brought you a story about a new and potentially dangerous technological innovation – Facebook in cars. To help end the week on a higher note, here’s some far more encouraging news on the transportation tech front.

A challenge to app developers aims to help this Boston bike-sharer plan his route, especially if it's lunch time. Photo: The Fosbury Flop

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has partnered with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation in issuing a challenge to software developers: Create three new programs that combine real-time transit, bike-sharing, and even food truck data, in order to demonstrate how transit and bike-sharing complement each other.

Boston rolled out their new 60-station, 600-cycle bike-sharing system, called Hubway and sponsored by shoe maker New Balance, last July. It has been so successful — logging 140,000 trips in just four months — that Boston’s Metropolitan Area Planning Council is overseeing its expansion to 90 stations and 900 bikes starting next year. But in addition to upping the number of bikes, Boston hopes to make Hubway more useful to its customers in other ways.

The MBTA/MassDOT challenge is really three separate challenges:

• A software application that combines transit schedules and real-time Hubway bike availability to display possible connections between the two modes;
• A visualization of “A day in the Life” of Boston’s transit and bike-sharing systems, possibly along the lines of what Oliver O’Brien has done for London; and, as a bonus,
• The BLT (Bikes, Lunch, & T) Challenge, with the goal of helping “residents and visitors learn about and get to Boston’s food trucks.”

The winners of the first two challenges will each receive a year-long transit pass and a year-long membership to Hubway; all three challenge winners will receive a free pass to area food truck festivals.

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This map of bike-share trips in D.C. reveals plenty about cycling patterns in the city, but New York City's data will be far more robust, including exact routes for each trip. Image: CommuterPageBlog via GGW.

Here’s one more reason to get excited about the launch of bike-share later this year: the reams of data generated by the GPS units located in every public bicycle. The Department of Transportation will use that data to inform their bike lane planning, commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan revealed last night.

“It’s going to be amazing to have GPS generated data for all these trips,” said Sadik-Khan. “For planning purposes, it’ll be huge.”

Right now, data on individual bike trips are very scarce. While bike-share trips aren’t representative of the larger set of bike trips, the ability to track exactly where a large set of riders bike and at what speeds could be quite valuable for bike planning. DOT has used taxi GPS data to measure traffic speeds in Manhattan and evaluate initiatives like the pedestrianization of parts of Broadway, and there’s far more that can still be done with that kind of rich data set. Bike-sharing could start to build a similar toolkit for bikes.

The GPS data, which will be owned by the city and made publicly available to the extent possible, will provide even more information than exists in other cities with bike-share. In D.C., for example, there’s excitement about a new data set that only shows which stations Capital Bikeshare riders are traveling between, not their exact routes.

What would you do with bike-share GPS data? Let us know in the comments.

It’s logged more than 140,000 rides over just four months. And now Boston’s brand new Hubway bike sharing system is packing it in for the cold New England winter.

Boston's Hubway bike sharing system will follow its successful first season with a major expansion. Photo: The Boston Globe

When it returns in the spring, Hubway will be expanding, adding stations in Cambridge, Somerville and Brookline. In total, the four-month-old bike sharing system will add 30 stations and roughly 300 bicycles — a 50 percent increase, according to The Boston Globe.

Hubway has come out of the gate roaring, surpassing early ridership figures from some of the country’s most well known bike sharing systems, the paper reports:

Its first 2 ½ months, Hubway recorded 100,000 station-to-station rides, significantly eclipsing the pace of similar systems in Minneapolis (where Nice Ride needed six months to reach that mark) and Denver (where B-cycle needed 7 ½ months).

And it seems Boston’s neighboring cities and towns were feeling left out of the bike sharing excitement. Jeff Levine, director of planning and community development in Brookline, told the Globe that the “number one question” he gets is, “When is Hubway coming to Brookline?”

Local news site BostInno credited the system with helping to make Boston more bike-friendly overall. According to writer Lisa DeCanio, despite some lingering ambivalence about biking in Boston, growing enthusiasm cleared the way for the removal of 71 parking spots on Massachusetts Avenue to make way for a bike lane. She called Hubway a “shining success,” noting that even the defending NHL champion Bruins have gotten on board, “with players riding to and from practice.”

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Earlier this month NYC DOT set off on a bike-share information tour, giving an introduction to the city’s plans for a public bike-sharing system to every community board in the proposed service area. Bike-share plans got an enthusiastic reception from the Manhattan CB2 Transportation Committee. And it turns out that the full board backs the program too. On October 20, CB 2 voted 41-0 for a resolution stating that the board “fully supports DOT’s new Bike Share program.”

Next up on the bike-share tour: Manhattan Community Board 8. The transportation committee will hear from DOT this Wednesday at 6:30. If you want to bring bike-share to the Upper East Side, you might want to speak up at this community board, where bike improvements seldom have an easy go of it.

After a series of polls showing big majorities of New Yorkers favor expanding the city’s bike lane network, the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute has turned its attention to a wider range of bike issues. It turns out that with 58 percent support, bike lanes aren’t even the most popular bike program the city is undertaking. That would be bike-share, which has a staggering 72 percent approval rating (23 percent are opposed).

Literally every demographic surveyed by Quinnipiac expressed majority support for bike-share. Staten Islanders were the most skeptical, but even in the city’s smallest borough, a slight majority of 52 percent of respondents said they support the program. A full 79 percent of Hispanics, and 87 percent of New Yorkers between the ages of 18 and 34, support the program.

Enthusiasm was slightly lower for the prospect of putting a bike-share station in people’s own neighborhood; 59 percent of people said they’d like to see bike-share near their home, compared to 34 percent who don’t want one.

Interestingly, far more people said they support the bike-share proposal than plan to use it. Only 45 percent of New Yorkers say they’d use bike-share to get around for short trips. Of course, if 45 percent of the city’s 8.4 million residents actually started riding bike-share, the program would probably be too popular to function.

The number of New Yorkers who support the expanded bike lane network remained essentially constant, with 58 percent in support and 37 percent opposed (a Marist poll, using different wording, found 66 percent support for bike lanes). The Q poll results display the classic NIMBY dynamic, however. When asked whether they want to see more bike lanes in their neighborhood, 46 percent of respondents were in favor and 48 percent opposed. Hispanics, Manhattanites and young people were the groups that showed majority support for bike lanes in their backyards.

With two stops in Brooklyn and one in Manhattan, the Department of Transportation this week continues its tour of community boards to present plans for city bike-share. In last week’s presentation to Manhattan Community Board 2, DOT officials provided new details on the proposed boundaries for the bike-share system, its cost structure, siting criteria and the public process moving forward. The public also had a chance to offer preliminary input (it was all positive feedback from District 2) and ask questions about how bike-share will work. For those excited or curious about the program, these meetings are worth attending:

• Tonight: Brooklyn CB 2, St. Francis College, 180 Remsen Street, First Floor Board Room, 6:00 p.m.
• Wednesday: Manhattan CB 4, Holland House, 351 West 42nd Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues), Piano Room, 6:30 p.m.
• Thursday: Brooklyn CB 6, Prospect Park Residence, 1 Prospect Park West (between Grand Army Plaza and President Street), 6:30 p.m.

In Brooklyn, the borders of the bike share system will roughly follow these contours. The final service area is still subject to change. Image: NYC DOT

Committing to a “very intensive participatory planning process,” top DOT officials provided a wealth of detail about the city’s plans for bike-sharing at a meeting of Manhattan Community Board 2′s transportation committee last night. Members of the board and local residents in attendance voiced strong support for the initiative.

When DOT selected Alta Bikeshare as the system operator last month, the basic contours of the program emerged: 10,000 bikes at 600 stations spread through an area stretching from 79th Street to Bed Stuy. Last night, DOT Policy Director Jon Orcutt presented new information about the service area, how stations will be sited, the system’s pricing and business model, and the public process moving forward [PDF].

Regarding the service area, Orcutt added important details about the bike-share network in the other boroughs. One slide provided the precise borders of the service area proposed by Alta for Brooklyn (right), though the boundary has yet to be finalized. DOT might extend bike-share into Long Island City, he said, giving it a foothold in Queens. Smaller, disconnected satellite systems could also be set up in the Bronx and on Staten Island; Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro has expressed interest in a system for the St. George neighborhood, for example.

Orcutt also shared a list of draft technical specifications for station placement [PDF]. DOT will avoid putting stations on sidewalks narrower than 16 feet, for example, or in the parking lane of avenues with high traffic volumes. Stations will generally be placed close to intersections rather than mid-block and in plaza space with low levels of pedestrian traffic wherever possible.

Beyond those criteria, he said, community input will heavily influence where stations are located, as long as there’s a station roughly every 1,000 feet and at critical locations. “Some communities may want them in parking lanes, some may want them on sidewalks,” said Orcutt. DOT will bring community boards and other stakeholders lists of potential sites with three to four times as many options as will ultimately be selected and let them choose their favorites. The board should feel free to say “the following locations are ‘hell no’ for whatever reasons,” he said. Those planning workshops will take place over the winter.

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