I come from a lifetime of riding bikes, mostly in cities either as a commuter or as a professional bike courier. As a New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) Climate Justice Fellow at SMI and Reddy Bikeshare, I did research to give myself a better picture of how bikeshare operations are conducted in different cities and countries. This research is guided by my previous 35 years of research about bike messengers combined with my personal experience of working as a bike messenger for many years This report is a manifestation of what I learned about the crossroads of commercial and environmental thinking, research and practice that is fostered by NYSERDA in its fellowships.
A guiding principle for my research was to combine everything I learned about climate from the fellowship with my experience in the field. My research inspired me to replicate some of the innovative bikeshare operations techniques I observed, including development of a cargo bike trailer for bikeshare rebalancing.
The key takeaways from my research were:
Successful bikeshare operations delegate autonomy in task prioritization to fleet technicians.
Lower capacity equipment doesn’t necessarily mean lower operational efficiency.
Route optimization software has many positive attributes, but human perspective in operations can have a force multiplying effect.
Human interactions are the silent driver of operations.
In order to understand how other operations do this critical task, it was necessary to research the context, cultural, physical and topography of the cities I compared in the report. A typical commuter renting a bike in Seoul behaves very differently than a student on the University at Buffalo’s South Campus. Hamilton and Buffalo’s climates are very similar, but different in critical ways. What bikes are used for in Toronto actually dictates where the bikes go hourly.
How a bikeshare operates tactically, from day to day, is largely dependent on the behavior of its city, citizens and how innovative and well-rounded the bikeshare staff is. Pinch points in management of that system can become liabilities or opportunities to innovate. For the purpose of my research, those past challenges that bikeshares overcame became signposts directing me to the libraries of institutional knowledge held in the minds of the people that lived through them.
As I stood on a corner in Paris this summer, I saw an entire city moved by bicycles. You don’t walk more than a block or two without seeing bikes for hire. Paris moves groceries, building supplies and almost anything you can think of on a huge array of cargo bikes and trailers. The Paris Bikeshare known as Vélib' Métropole also does some bikeshare rebalancing by bike as well. Seeing these examples through my research, I was inspired to do rebalancing of Reddy bikes by E-bike and trailer.
35 years ago, when I rode my bike in Buffalo, I was the only cyclist anywhere I went. No matter if it was winter or summer, I had only the company of cars and trucks. There were no bike lanes, there was no bike community. The most important thing I took away from writing this report is how innovation, much like the innovation found in the Complete Streets movement, can turn into a positive feedback loop. This in turn builds bike ecosystems that create a virtuous cycle for successful bikeshare while improving the lives of the people who use it.
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