Three months after Washington, D.C. became the first American city to launch its own European-style bike sharing program, Philadelphia is also considering an initiative that make racks of bicycles readily available on the city’s streets.
According to an Associated Press report today, bicycle activists in Philadelphia, with possible corporate backing, is pushing city officials to establish a bike-share program. In what could be the nation’s largest such program, thousands of bikes would be stationed at hundreds of kiosks. Subscribers would have ready access to the bikes to use and return to the same or another kiosk.
Washington unveiled its bike program in February and began operation in March with 10 bicycle stations and 120 bikes. San Francisco is close to launching a bike-sharing program. New York, Chicago, Portland, Ore., and Louisville, Ky. are either working toward establishing or considering similar programs.
Bike-sharing programs are already established in Europe. Paris launched one last summer with 10,600 bicycles at 750 stations across the city. Parisians swipe a card to unlock a bike, ride it anywhere in the city and then drop it back off at any bike station. Those stations are often located adjacent to a subway or train stop. Oslo, Norway, Stockholm, Sweden, and Barcelona, Spain also have such programs.
In Philadelphia, bike-sharing advocate Russell Meddin, estimated the City of Brotherly Love would need 250 to 300 stations and 4,000 to 5,000 bicycles in order for people to find it reliable. Start-up costs for a program in Philadelphia could be about $15 million at the outset, according to one estimate.
City officials want to gauge how much interest there would be in the program and figure out what the business plan would be, including who would operate it and where the funding would come from.
Rina Cutler, deputy mayor for transportation, said she wants to have more discussions with people in the bicycling community and bicycle shops that could be involved in the program. She also wants more information on what kind of costs the city would face.
In Washington, the city will get some of the money from users’ subscription fees, as well as some of the advertising revenue that will be used to fund the program, said Martina Schmidt, the director of SmartBike.
The ideal model for any bike-sharing program, she said, is to fund it primarily through revenue from advertising on street furniture and other places.
But at this point, Schmidt said officials don’t know exactly how much money will be brought in or how much such a program will cost.
Advocates believe there is potential. They say that, with fewer than 1.5 percent of trips in Philadelphia taken by bicycle, there is a big market of non-bike-owners to tap as the numbers on the gas pumps continue to spin.
“As the cost of car ownership and gas continues to go up, more and more people are going to be looking at alternatives to paying all this money to go places in a car,” said Alex Doty, executive director of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia.
