Bailout

Why small-scale bike sharing won?t work

By Felix Salmon

SoBi, short for social bicycles, is a gutsy startup trying to make bike-sharing more accessible by reducing the up-front infrastructure costs. Don’t create dedicated parking spaces: allow bikes to be parked anywhere. Don’t commission custom bicycles: design a gizmo which attaches easily to any bike instead. And store information in the cloud, allowing what I think is the smartest new idea of all: rather than paying contractors to move hundreds of bicycles every night from where they’re not wanted to where they are wanted, simply pay the bike riders themselves a bonus of a buck or two if they leave the bike in an area where they’re in high demand.

But I still don’t think this’ll work, and not just because SoBi was silly enough to demonstrate their first real-life prototype on a fixed-gear bike with no rear brake. Something less suitable for sharing can hardly be imagined. People come in a large range of shapes and sizes, and need to be able to adjust their bikes easily when they find them: that’s easier said than done. Standardized bikes also make repairs a great deal easier and cheaper: being able to install this system on any old bike is not much of an advantage, really. And more generally, it’s pretty hard to find suitable bike parking if your only option for locking the bike is to find a rack which you can attach the bike to from one position over the real wheel.

The big problem, however, is in the ongoing costs of running the system — finding broken bikes, repairing those bikes, maintaining the information infrastructure, etc etc. Where bike sharing exists already, in cities like Paris, Munich, and now London, it’s institutionalized with a lot of corporate sponsorship and advertising: a very large chunk of money in those cities, for instance, has come from JCDecaux, Deutsche Bahn, and Barclays, respectively. Big corporations like that want standardization and predictability and on-message branding: they don’t want to be associated with users locking their bikes illegally to any old railing or pole, irritating merchants and pedestrians.

Bike sharing is something best done city-wide, at large expense, by a big corporation risking its reputation to at least some extent, with a lot of public money and support as well. Small local schemes are likely to start with great enthusiasm and then run out of steam or money pretty quickly, no matter how clever they seem. I look forward to a big public scheme paying its users for returning bikes to high-demand areas. But beyond that I’m not very optimistic about SoBi.

Full post as published by Macroprudential on August 11, 2010 (boomark / email).