Since Mayor Mike and the city’s DOT are failing to fully explain why NYC’s bike share program is a month behind the scheduled roll-out, it’s probably helpful to look to other cities stuck in the same kind of rut.

Both Chicago and Chattanooga, TN cut deals with the same for-profit company responsible for the implementation of bike share in New York City.  Both Chattanooga and Chicago have also been mired in delays shrouded in uncertainty.  The outfit in the spotlight here is Alta Bicycle Share, an affiliated company of Alta Planning and Design based in Portland, Oregon.

With Alta hired as the program’s administrator, Mayor Mike spent many months touting a July 2012 bike share launch at hundreds of stations across midtown and lower Manhattan plus spots in Brooklyn and Eastern Queens.  There has been great excitement about the blueprint but it’s clear now as we sit here in the middle of August that there are no bikes and no significant infrastructure set up to make them available.  What happened?

All Mayor Mike will say when pressed is there’s a software glitch.  He won’t provide a timetable for a fix and he has laughed off public concerns about the delay.  Alta’s corporate website is even less transparent.  It celebrates successful implementation of bike share in Boston and DC but offers no update about its failures here.  Its public pronouncements pertaining to bike share in New York and Chattanooga are long outdated and devoid of any mention of implementation missteps.

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel says his city’s delayed bike-share program isn’t software-related and he denies reports that Alta’s successful bid there was rigged.  Chattanooga finally has bikes but local media reports say users are experiencing problems processing rentals.

Citicorp’s sponsorship of bike share in New York has made the program’s official title “Citi Bike.”  That seems to have enabled Alta to hide behind a nickname while it works out its problems.  On Alta’s Citi Bike Twitter page, public concerns about the delayed launch have been deflected to the city’s transportation department.  When you pull up DOT’s link on bike share, it ping-pong’s responsibility back to Alta.

The coy weirdness by both the public and private entities controlling NYC bike share isn’t acceptable given government’s involvement in it all.  I understand the need to get it right before implementation but forthright explanations would go a long way in helping eager bike-riders know when they get start putting feet on pedals.