November 13, 2017

Seattle’s Newest Outdoor Activities: Bike Share and Bike Share Trolling

In March Seattle city council voted to remove its bike share program (Pronto) and redirect any proposed funding for future bike shares. At that point I wrote a blog post talking about how Seattle would be the perfect location for a private free float bike share company. I had little expectation that this would happen but while in Washington D.C. for the summer, I got word that the city decided to permit three bike share companies (with even more to come), Limebike, Ofo, and Spin to operate within the city. The permit requires that bikes be parked in certain types of locations (more on this later), that each company provides data to the city, and that they have a minimum of 500 bikes.

With an average of 2,231 rides a day, these companies have been quite successful in comparison to Pronto’s 309 rides a day. I suspect that the main reasons these companies have been successful are the flexibility of the free float systems and the increased coverage caused by having 5,500 more bikes than Pronto. At 6,000 bikes, the system as a whole is larger than Chicago’s bike share Divvy. However, Divvy experiences 3.2 million trips a year as of 2015, or 8,800/day approximately four times Seattle’s ridership. Keep in mind the Seattle numbers are average daily rides during summer months.  On top of this, Seattle’s numbers are probably over-inflated due to the record setting good weather summer the city just experienced. Without a doubt, ridership will slow down as we head into wetter, colder weather.

As someone who has ridden bikes from each of the systems, I initially enjoyed Limebike the most. However, on a recent ride, I noticed something troubling about their bikes; The pedals are very slick and have little grip when they become wet. This seemed like a huge oversight by the company to not ensure that their bikes have pedals that would work well in wet conditions. However, Limebike does have disc brakes which are better for winter riding. In comparison, Spin uses pad breaks that are not as useful in wet conditions, but has better pedals. Ofo uses disc breaks and has better pedals but the bikes’ gear ratios aren’t as good and they are not as easy to check out because you have to enter a code from your phone, rather than just scanning a QR code. With this in mind, winter is set to be an important learning experience for each of these companies.

            In addition to this new outdoor activity, Seattleites have also been able to take part in another activity known as bike share trolling. Bike share trolling is a new fun game played between the bike share companies and some of the city’s residents. In this game, the goal is to place the bike share bikes in a location that is very annoying for the bike share companies and people to retrieve. Examples of this can be seen in this article (my personal favorite is the bike on top of the Fremont Troll). Although I do see the humor of this activity, I also understand that it is negatively impacting the companies. This is just one example of a bigger problem related to these bikes. People are not leaving them in the proper locations as outlined by the permit and they are not leaving them right side up which makes the bikes look more like litter than a bike share system. This is increasing the cost of operations for the companies and leading some people to refer to the bikes as litter. In addition, many bikes have been vandalized and have had parts stolen or broken off. I am happy bike share is back in Seattle but even with recent success, I am worried about the long-term success of the system.