Portland overhauls bike share plan, braces to launch with or without a sponsor

Buddysbike

Next week, Portland will consider a contract to put 600 “smart bikes” like this one (from Orlando’s Juice system) on the street by next July at no cost to the city.
(Photo: City of Orlando)

First in a four-post series today about bike sharing in Portland.

Nine years after being one of the first U.S. cities to float the concept, the City of Portland plans to announce today that it’s finally ready to launch a public bike sharing system.

The key to the plan, which would be required to launch by July 2016: the city is planning to skip a generation of bike-sharing technology and launch a system that uses “smart bikes” with built-in GPS and self-locking mechanisms. The revised system would be 20 percent smaller but about 55 percent cheaper than the one the city originally planned.

A revised contract with Motivate Inc., formerly known as Alta Bicycle Share, is scheduled for review by Portland’s city council next Wednesday.

For occasional users and tourists, the price will be $2.50 for up to 30 minutes. Heavy users will be able to sign 12-month contracts at $10 to $15 per month.

If approved, the deal will bring 600 45-pound “smart bikes” to the streets of central Portland by next summer — with or without a corporate sponsor.

For occasional users and tourists, the price to ride will be $2.50 for a ride of up to 30 minutes. Heavy users will be able to sign 12-month contracts at $10 to $15 per month to get a free daily allowance of 90 minutes.

Month-to-month memberships will be more expensive. Their exact price is yet to be determined.

The city says that if a corporate sponsor is not found, the system will probably lose money. But New York-based Motivate has agreed to eat any losses itself for the first three years — a shift in responsibility intended to light a fire under Motivate to recruit a sponsor.

City’s goal: lowering the barrier for trying bike transportation

Mia Birk at bike share event

Former Motivate co-owner Mia Birk pitches possible sponsors of a Portland Bike Share. The city’s old contract essentially split sales duties between Motivate and the city; the new one puts them squarely on Motivate.

A “yes” vote from city council next week would advance a longtime goal of Portland biking advocates and fulfill one of city Transportation Director Leah Treat’s four major goals for 2015: to set a bike share launch date in 2016.

The point of a bike sharing system, the city says, is to let people decide to start biking midday without having to plan ahead.

City bike share project manager Steve Hoyt-McBeth said in an interview Friday that a bike share system will help the city crack a nut it’s been working on for many years: making it easy for more Portlanders to ease their way into bike transportation gradually rather than making it a major life decision.

“When you wake up in the morning on a work day, you decide whether you’re going to ride a bike for the rest of the day,” Hoyt-McBeth said. “You make that decision in the morning, at a time when you’re the most stressed, when you’re most pressed for time and when the weather is unlikely to be very nice.”

The point of a bike sharing system is to let people decide to start biking midday, without having to plan ahead.

“At any time during the day, no matter how you came to that bike share station, bike share is there to go to a meeting, back home or simply for a ride,” he said.

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New plan is much revised from 2012 plan

BikeShare area map 9-8

The planned bike share system map. Bikes could be parked anywhere in this area for a small fee, or near the official docks for free.
(Image: City of Portland. Click here for full map.)

The bike sharing system being announced today is very different from the one the city anticipated in 2012, when it accepted a proposal from Motivate for a “smart dock” system that would have been modeled on Motivate’s successful one in Washington D.C.

Here are some of the many changes:

• Portland might launch bike sharing without a primary corporate sponsor. After years of delays related to unease among potential sponsors, the city has found a new solution: plan to launch with or without one, and aim to get one later on if possible. (This tactic was successfully used by Chicago, Treat’s previous employer, among other cities.)

• Motivate is shouldering the risk for the first three years. If a sponsor isn’t recruited to subsidize the system’s cost, the operating losses will go to Motivate. Unlike the old system, this gives the company a powerful incentive to recruit a sponsor.

If no sponsor is found or the expenses are higher than expected, Motivate’s commitment will expire in 2019 and Portland will be left with a better system than it can afford to operate.

Here’s the catch: the city’s bike share grant, which originated with the federal government, requires it to operate a system for at least five years. If no sponsor is found or the expenses are higher than expected, Motivate’s commitment will expire in 2019 and Portland will be left with a better system than it can afford to operate. If that happens, it’d have to scale the system down.

On the other hand, the system might turn out to operate profitably within a year or two, as Phoenix says its system will. If that happens, Motivate would pocket 60 percent of the proceeds for the first three years but the city would be in a strong position to get a slice of the profits starting in 2019.

City Active Transportation Manager Margi Bradway, a former insurance lawyer for Stoel Rives who has helped represent the city in its recent negotiations with Motivate, said Friday that this agreement — for Motivate to assume both the risk and most of the reward for a few years — was the key to resurrecting Portland bike share.

ubike

Close-up of the locking system on a Social Bicycles bike at the University of Virginia. The city expects to let the bikes be locked for free anywhere on a city block that has an official dock; the bikes’ GPS can sense whether they’re close enough to the dock.

• The equipment will be much cheaper. In 2012, Motivate (then known as Alta Bicycle Share) nearly tanked. This was because it had signed an exclusive contract with Montreal-based firm PBSC, and the latest version of PBSC’s software turned out to be a lemon. Over the year that followed, bike share launches were delayed across the country. Portland’s was one.

Today’s proposal sweeps that away. For the first time, city staff said, Motivate has agreed to operate a new system — both hardware and software — that doesn’t come from PBSC.

Instead, the system will come from Social Bicycles, a young, fast-growing bike share company that provides equipment to the bike share systems in Phoenix, Santa Monica, Tampa, Topeka, Boise, Orlando, Ottawa, and Hamilton.

The smart-bike system’s 44 percent savings per bike is the main reason the city will be able to launch without a sponsor.

The key to Social Bicycles’ equipment: instead of using sophisticated computerized “smart docks” like the ones developed by PBSC and B-Cycle for cities like D.C., New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Denver and Minneapolis, its systems put the computer on the bicycle itself.

This approach turns out to be much cheaper, Hoyt-McBeth says. The city’s old plan was to spend $4.5 million for 750 bikes and 75 stations. Its new plan is to spend about $2 million for 600 bikes and 60 stations. That 44 percent savings per bike is the main reason the city will be able to launch without a sponsor. (We’ll explore this further in another post later this morning.)

• The stations will be less dense. The 60-station, eight-square-mile service area will be approximately the same as previously expected, running northwest to 24th Avenue, southwest to I-405 plus the South Waterfront, southeast to Powell and 12th and northeast to the Lloyd District, plus inner North/Northeast Portland between Interstate and MLK as far north as Killingsworth. But the stations themselves will be less densely packed than under the old system: every few blocks downtown, every more than a few blocks elsewhere.

• The local matching funds will come from the public after all. When Portland City Council agreed in 2011 to apply for a bike sharing grant, bike share was pitted against freight and sidewalk projects for scarce city dollars. At the time, Commissioner Dan Saltzman said he would support it only if the city didn’t provide any operating subsidy for the system. (His comments are on p. 39 of the minutes from that meeting.)

In a sense, nothing has changed; the city still isn’t planning to hand Motivate an operating subsidy for its system. But the city is planning (as it would have under the 2012 scenario) to continue assigning Hoyt-McBeth to be bike share’s half-time project manager, overseeing the contract on the city’s behalf. And because there’s no sponsor yet, the city is planning to designate about half of Hoyt-McBeth’s $86,000 salary (over the last three years and the next three) as the 10 percent “local match” required by the federal grant.

This is just a procedural change, not a reallocation of money. But it’s also an acknowledgment that yes, local taxpayers are, and already have been, spending something (about $40,000 a year) to have a public bike-sharing system.

On Wednesday, Saltzman policy manager Matt Grumm said PBOT’s time overseeing the contract isn’t a problem for the commissioner as long as the city doesn’t send money directly to Motivate.

“That’s not something Dan has brought up,” Grumm said. “For Motivate to operate it on their own with no city dollars going there is exactly what he wanted to see. … So far, what it looks, it looks pretty good to him.”

Will this bike share plan work?

gridbikes

If the council approves a contract next week — and based on this process so far, we’ll reserve judgment on how likely that is — it’ll be a big day for biking in Portland.

At that point, the question will become: will the system work?

Stay tuned. Still to come this morning, we’ve got three more posts that will analyze the factors that could make Portland bike sharing fly or flop.

Corrections 6:25 a.m.: A previous version of this post contained three errors. It said credit card readers will be built into the bikes; the bikes only receive PIN numbers after purchases have been made via web, mobile app or one of 11 wired stations. The post overstated the amount of profit that Motivate would take home; the company stands to get 60 percent of the upside, not all of it. Finally, it incorrectly suggested that Hoyt-McBeth had spoken with Commissioner Saltzman about the subsidy issue. He hasn’t.

Michael Andersen (Contributor)

Michael Andersen (Contributor)

Michael Andersen was news editor of BikePortland.org from 2013 to 2016 and still pops up occasionally.

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Harald
8 years ago

So the station density would come out to 7.5 stations per square mile, putting it towards the lower end (but not at the bottom) compared to other systems. If NACTO study is right about the relationship between density and use, the Portland system is unlikely to generate a high number of rides per bike. Of course, the NACTO study certainly only captures one of many predictors of success, and so we’ll have to see how things will turn out. Does anybody know how the other cities using Social Bicycles are doing?

William Henderson
William Henderson
8 years ago
Reply to  Harald

This is the really great thing about going with a smart bike model. First, you don’t have to park at a station – only if you want to avoid the fee. Will be interesting to see how this changes the dynamic. Second, it’s easy and cheap to add or reconfigure ‘stations’ because they are really just glorified bike racks plus a GPS boundary area on a server. If the city sees low ridership it suspects is a result of station density, it can fix that.

Joseph E
8 years ago
Reply to  Harald

This is the biggest problem. The number of stations (and bikes) needs to be doubled, or the area covered should be reduced until extra funding is available. High density of stations, and high density of destinations for trips, is the biggest predictor of bike share usage.

Alan Kessler
Alan Kessler
8 years ago
Reply to  Harald

The sample size is probably to small to be making these observations… but… Looking at the small chart on the NACTO study, it looks like going from 4 to 5 stations per square mile gets you a doubling of usage per bike. Nice Ride (1.6) to Hubway (3.2). The data implies that going from 5 to 33 won’t even get you another doubling: Velib (5.3). Based only on this data (again… small sample size… grain of salt), 7.5 seems like a defensible density choice.

Alan Kessler
Alan Kessler
8 years ago
Reply to  Alan Kessler

Ack! *too small

Schrauf
Schrauf
8 years ago

Bikes look MUCH lighter and sleeker than the behemoths I used in Paris. I’m surprised they are nevertheless 45 pounds.

Endo
Endo
8 years ago

The city has set this up to fail on purpose. The density is more enough that only hardcore people will ride, and those people have bikes already. Meanwhile Hales will claim the city tried but there wasn’t enough interest because people prefer their murder machines. Bikewashing 101.

aaron
aaron
8 years ago

/holdsbreath

john
john
8 years ago

Tampa, Topeka, Boise… and finally, Platinumland.

paikiala
paikiala
8 years ago

I understand the close proximity to downtown destinations, tourists and the occasional office worker, and inner east side that has the highest bike mode share already. Equity-wise, this doesn’t match PBOT talk. Some bike stations coincident with light rail stations and greenways, with satellite stations farther out in the neighborhoods would seem to do more to encourage use as a commute option between homes and trains – the ‘last mile’ thing.

paikiala
paikiala
8 years ago
Reply to  paikiala

Maybe a parallel program with Tri-Met as sponsor – trunk and branch style – with one monthly pass for both systems…. sorry, dozed off there for a moment.

Adam H.
Adam H.
8 years ago

No reason the bike share can’t accept the Hop card.

MNBikeLuv
MNBikeLuv
8 years ago

Why in the world don’t they follow the Nice Ride funding route?

Nice Ride MN is one of the oldest in the nation (2008) and one of the few completely non-profit independently funded bike shares in the world.

I realize BC/BS helped out with Nice Ride and has been a title sponsor since, but Nice Ride MN is a non-profit that allows it to operate without being chained to a corporate sponsor. If BC/BS jumps ship, it’s just about getting another sponsor in. And there are plenty of sponsors waiting in the wings. Also, Nice Ride keeps the profit, not a contractor like Motivate, so it can keep operating on lower income and expand as revenue allows.

You can find out more about Nice Ride MN here: https://www.niceridemn.org/about/

And you can listen to the history of Nice Ride and how its funding is different here: http://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/04/22/pedal-hub-episode-36

davemess
davemess
8 years ago

The fact that Orlando beat us to something bike related is stunning.

JJJJ
8 years ago

“bike share systems in Phoenix, Santa Monica, Tampa, Topeka, Boise, Orlando, Ottawa, and Hamilton.”

Quite the list of heavy hitters! Portland should be honored to follow in the path of giants.

davemess
davemess
8 years ago

$2.50 per ride? Wonder what the daily cost will be. And a 90 minute limit is silly.
They essentially will be preventing most tourists from using these.

Tom Hardy
Tom Hardy
8 years ago
Reply to  davemess

Makes MAX look pretty cheap. Most newby riders take that long to really figure out how to ride a bike on the sidewalk, let alone in traffic on the street.

Gary B
Gary B
8 years ago
Reply to  davemess

I wouldn’t be surprised if the fee model is somewhat designed to preserve the viability of our local rental businesses. Surely they must be concerned, and vocal, about bikeshare killing their business.

davemess
davemess
8 years ago
Reply to  Gary B

You know, we rented bikes to ride around Vancouver, B.C. last weekend, and I was thinking about this. I don’t know that bikeshare will be a huge competitor to regular rentals. People that rent bikes to actually ride them (not just to get from place to place) are going to want them for more than <30 min. increments. When I used NiceBike in MN it was pretty annoying to have to look for a station to switch out bikes every 20-30 minutes.
I think they both will have their niche, and while there might be some overlap, I don't know that it will be that much.

Gary B
Gary B
8 years ago
Reply to  davemess

Right, I think they will have their niche under this approach. But from the other article I understand NYC’s pricing is primarily targeting tourists. That model (unlimited rides in a day, higher fee) would compete directly with tourists, who are typically going point-to-point and would dock at a station at each stop.

davemess
davemess
8 years ago
Reply to  Gary B

Depends on what the tourists want to do though. In Vancouver for example people rent bikes to ride the Seawall, so they need the bikes for much longer than 30 min. increments. NYC people are going to from place to place, they’re not just riding to ride. I bet Portland is probably somewhere win the middle.

Hello, Kitty
Hello, Kitty
8 years ago
Reply to  davemess

Short rides should be free… you shouldn’t start paying until you’ve had the thing out for, say, half an hour.

9watts
9watts
8 years ago

“The point of a bike sharing system is to let people decide to start biking midday, without having to plan ahead.”

Hm. I’m having a hard time making sense of this. If they drove to work this makes no sense. I’d like to see this fleshed out a bit more. I think I’m missing something about how people think about (or are assumed to think about) their transportation options throughout the day, or their life.

Harald
8 years ago
Reply to  9watts

It’s raining in the morning and you take the bus to work. Skies are clear in the afternoon and you take bike share to get back home. Not that hard. Same goes for riding to the bar, getting wasted, getting a cab to get back home safely.

ethan
ethan
8 years ago
Reply to  Harald

“you take bike share to get back home”

Not with that coverage area! This system doesn’t even go to my neighborhood, let alone anywhere near my house.

davemess
davemess
8 years ago
Reply to  ethan

The bike rich get richer…….

Gary B
Gary B
8 years ago
Reply to  9watts

My partner takes the max or drives to her office, in this coverage area. I often want to meet her for lunch. I love to bike to meet her, but that means we are staying in walking distance. I’d love to meet her at the office, grab a bike for her, and go somewhere we really want (and get a nice ride in). Just one anecdote, but that’s the type of intra-day use I see happening–running quick errands, etc.

davemess
davemess
8 years ago
Reply to  9watts

I thought that was a really weird statement too. I really don’t think people who haven’t been riding at all are going to start doing so downtown and other areas of that map that are not the absolute more hospitable to biking.
The idea that lots of people will use this on a whim seem a little far fetched. It might happen, but the vast majority of people have their day fairly well planned out ahead of time.

Dan
Dan
8 years ago

45 pounds per bike? My commuter bike is a hog, but these bikes put mine to shame in the flab department. Can’t imagine riding one of these from downtown up Tabor.

Paul
Paul
8 years ago
Reply to  Dan

Why would anyone ride one up Tabor?

chris
chris
8 years ago
Reply to  Paul

Exercise? It would be like doing weighted pullups.

Dan
Dan
8 years ago
Reply to  Paul

They are tourists who don’t know any better and want to work up an appetite for their reservations at Pok Pok. 😉

JeffS
JeffS
8 years ago
Reply to  Dan

Sorry, outside of the service area. Perhaps you meant to say Voodoo?

This is one of those times when a squared off map isn’t the right answer. I don’t want to call out anything and hurt people’s feelings, but there’s a large portion of this map that won’t be utilized and quite a few areas that would be, but are cut off.

Whatever. I’m riding my own bike anyway, and yet again, helping to subsidize the same old areas.

davemess
davemess
8 years ago
Reply to  Dan

Doubtful you’d make it Tabor and back (from SE 12th) in less than 30 minutes though!

Eric Leifsdad
Eric Leifsdad
8 years ago
Reply to  davemess

You only need about 6-10% more power to haul an extra 20lb up a hill (6%-14% grade.) Double that if you’re 98lb on your CF bike.

Eric Leifsdad
Eric Leifsdad
8 years ago
Reply to  Dan

I was looking forward to riding a $3000 bike up to pittock mansion or at least to the top of Corbett to park next to the zip cars. They have motors, right?

Eric Leifsdad
Eric Leifsdad
8 years ago
Reply to  Eric Leifsdad

I meant Zip2go cars or something.

maccoinnich
8 years ago

I’m looking forward to Bike Share launching, but we’re going to need a much improved bike network for people to use it on. The map the City used as the base for the coverage map has quite a few errors in it, which mostly make the bike network look better:

– It shows Marshall as a greenway all the way up to NW 24th. They only made greenway improvments, such as they are, to NW 19th. Marshall doesn’t even exist as a street through Legacy Good Sam.
– It shows the Everett bike lane extending to NW 14th, which it used to, but doesn’t anymore. The Everett bike lane does extend up to NW 23rd, but that is shown.
– It shows SW 4th between Lincoln and Harrison as a low traffic street.
– It shows NW Johnson and Overton as being greenways through the Pearl, which they aren’t.

Paul
Paul
8 years ago
Reply to  maccoinnich

You know, San Diego has a bike share system and their infrastructure is terrible. Basically no bike infra downtown, a few buffered lanes and sharrows here and there in mid-city. I’m curious how it’s doing.

Steve B
Steve B
8 years ago
Reply to  maccoinnich

Amen. Let’s get some of these much needed improvements on the ground *before* launching bike share.

JeffS
JeffS
8 years ago
Reply to  maccoinnich

perhaps a few tourists and their rental bikes splattered across the pavement would be good motivation some change?

Sadly, the expected change would be to scrap the bike share.

Allan Rudwick
Allan
8 years ago

How much do the bikes cost? If there aren’t enough bikes in the system it seems like donations from the public could make up the difference. Or could be used to expand the system. I think its going to be great.
– Will there be a credit for taking a bike that’s not at a station to a station?

Matt F
Matt F
8 years ago

Been riding daily here for 15 years now…still think this is needless

Jayson
Jayson
8 years ago
Reply to  Matt F

That’s cause you probably take your bike with you everywhere. That’s great and all, but you’re not the market this system supports, which is a much larger set of people – people that don’t necessarily bike to work most of the year, or even at all. I am a summer/fair weather rider and I would find this system VERY USEFUL, particularly since I take transit most of the time and get downtown without a bike or a car. That’s 45% of downtown’s workers – close to 40,000 folks in the market area. There’s another 20,000 + Central City residents that could also take advantage of it.

Matt F
Matt F
8 years ago
Reply to  Jayson

Fair enough. I guess I’m not putting myself in your shoes enough. When would you use it? What would use it for to go do?

chris
chris
8 years ago

Cool! Kind of odd though that the northeast zone extends as far north as Killingsworth, but the SE zone only goes to 12th. With the exception of a couple of new apartments, SE is an industrial zone out to 12th, although there are a couple of nightlife spots within that area. It won’t actually encompass where a lot of people actually live though until it’s extended out to 28th.

davemess
davemess
8 years ago
Reply to  chris

I’m really surprised it’s not going to both Reed and UP. Seems like colleges would be a pretty good market for it.

9watts
9watts
8 years ago
Reply to  davemess

Perhaps. Though I’d have thought that college students already have their own bikes. And if they don’t are they going to use this kind of a system? I know folks here know way more about these systems than I probably ever will but I keep having this same question. Other cities have these systems and they work (by most accounts) pretty well. Can anyone offer a demographic breakdown of who uses these bikes?

Thanks.

Mao
Mao
8 years ago
Reply to  9watts

You could have students who don’t typically leave the local area, recently lost a bike for one reason or another, or don’t want to deal with a bike and maintenance.
If you could rent a bike 2.50 for an hour or 4 for two hours I would 100% support this. But how can someone make a round trip at 2.50 for 30 minutes? At that rate for any distance over 2 miles I would ride the bus and walk for any distance under.

Alan 1.0
Alan 1.0
8 years ago
Reply to  Mao

On bikeshares which offer the first 30 minutes free, it’s very common to stop at an intermediate station and check the bike in and right back out to reset the clock.

davemess
davemess
8 years ago
Reply to  9watts

Nice Bike has a lot of stops in/around U. Minnesota. I think there is clearly a market for it. Not everyone wants the hassles of storing/locking/maintaining a bike.

davemess
davemess
8 years ago
Reply to  9watts

https://www.niceridemn.org/_asset/dvhz30/Nice-Ride-Five-Year-Assessment-060415.pdf

Though it doesn’t have exactly what you ask.
Many of these bike share systems are doing okay to well. SOMEONE is using them.

maccoinnich
8 years ago
Reply to  davemess

Reed has a very small student body, and the surrounding areas are mostly low density residential neighborhoods. University of Portland is somewhat larger, though still a lot smaller than PSU. Its location would be even harder to serve with bikeshare though.

Adam Herstein
Adam Herstein
8 years ago

Finally! Can’t wait for this to finally launch. When can we expect the rest of SE to be included in the rollout? Currently, very little of the east side is included.

Mindful Cyclist
Mindful Cyclist
8 years ago
Reply to  Adam Herstein

The city time and time again, has shown very little interest in anything past 39th, so I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Dwaine Dibbly
Dwaine Dibbly
8 years ago

I hope the electronics are waterproof & rugged. The vibration on a bike makes it a rough environment.