NYC Bike Share | THE SAUERBRUN REPORT

Mayor Mike’s failed 2008 effort to impose congestion pricing as a way of improving flow/movement inside Manhattan has reemerged in a way likely to succeed without a stodgy obstructionist like Shelly Silver getting in the way.

It’s New York City’s bike-share program.

Bloomberg won’t be at the helm when bike-share eventually does what the Mayor and his passionately pro-bike Transportation commissioner Jannete Sadik-Khan know is coming. But it’s only a matter of time before the success of bike share forces future city planners to re-imagine transportation in a place bursting at the above-ground seams with pedestrians, cars and yes – bicycles.

Bike share is a bit sneaky in that it’s an end-around or trick play to un-do Manhattan’s current bow to emphasis on vehicular traffic. As it is now, it’s extremely dangerous to be a bike rider in Manhattan. Sadik-Khan and Mayor Mike have force-fed hundreds of miles of new bike lanes without any correlating reduction in run-of-the-mill automobile operators who often see the streets as their own. Bike share adds thousands of bikes, racks and riders. The inevitable success of this program will collide with an outdated view of transportation in this city by adding a simple-to-resolve conflict that will force solutions favoring bikes over cars.

There’s no doubt it will be messy as a new flock of bike riders with sudden and cheap access to two-wheelers claim rightful positions on city streets but the collective mindset of the populace is bound to shift. Painted lines used to set aside space for bicyclists will be seen differently as we go along. Automobile drivers and pedestrians who currently are inclined to ignore or disrespect bike lanes will lose the turf war.

It will take time. Maybe years. The first wave of enthusiastic cyclists riding the distinctive blue machines pulled from hundreds of high-tech racks all over Manhattan and Brooklyn will get hit by car doors and go down in a heap. There will be politicians, community leaders and members of the media who say New York City doesn’t have room for bike share. But the good to come from it will win out in a big way. If the program is managed properly, the look and feel of the city grid will undergo a conversion that embraces a sane much-needed tilt away from the automobile.

My charter bike-share membership purchased online for $103.43 (tax included) gets me a year’s worth of free bike rides. Annual members have 45 minutes of bike time at a crack but can reset the clock simply by returning their bike to a rack and pulling another one out.

Since I have intense fear of a collision, I choose my rides carefully, My maiden bike-share voyage last Tuesday morning started at the rack next to DeWitt Clinton Park at 52nd Street and 11th Avenue. From there, I walked the bike a half block west towards the river and started pedaling southbound on the Greenway. The path along the Hudson is largely protected from vehicular movement. I only had to stop one time for a red light near the Air and Space Museum. The bike is a heavy, clunky machine and my out-of-shape legs grew weary when I hit Chelsea. I returned the bike at 16th and 10th to a rack just steps from the southern-most point of the High Line. The duration of the trip was just 20 minutes.

Bike share won’t change the way I commute to work. There are no bikes yet in Queens. During the public input process, I logged requests for a bike share station at LaGuardia Airport and Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. There’s no immediate plan to add bike share stations at either place. My enthusiasm for bike share isn’t so much for its immediate utility but for the promise of a serious movement that now has momentum not seen here since congestion pricing failed at the offices of guys whose idea of a commute is a once-a-week ride up to Albany.

If a heavy tariff or ban on automobile users entering Manhattan isn’t politically feasible, perhaps the new influx of bicyclists with courage to insist inhabitants of this city would move around better with more bikes and less cars is the needed push for change. You won’t see me on a blue bike-share bike cruising the bike lane down Broadway, but someday the outcome of all this may make that journey a safe and efficient one.

That’s what I’m hoping for. And that’s why I’m fully supportive of this endeavor.

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.