London's bike share crisis - from The Atlantic magazine is this Divvy in a few years?

Something is going badly wrong with London's bike-share scheme. Launched in summer 2010 to great enthusiasm, London's 4,000 "Boris Bikes" (so called after Mayor Boris Johnson) were supposed to usher a new age of car-free, cycle friendly streets to the city. This year, however, their popularity has fallen by almost a third. While the system recorded 726,893 journeys in November 2012, last month there were only 514,146. To cap these poor user figures, today Transport for London announced that the scheme's major sponsor, Barclays Bank, will pull out of its sponsorship deal in 2015. Given the bad publicity the system has received recently, it may be hard to find a replacement sponsor without some major changes.

So why has London's bike-share scheme gone awry?

In order of gravity, the answers seem to be cost, danger, and patchy maintenance. This January, bike-share prices doubled, from an hourly rate of £1 to £2. While the older rate was a clear bargain, the new rate edged close enough to the cost of public transit to make many wonder if the price was worth the hassle of finding a bike and getting sweaty riding it.

It may be hard to find a replacement sponsor without some major changes.

Then there’s the matter of London roads' increasing deadliness for cyclists. Five cyclists were killed on city roads in just 9 days last month, a death toll that recently sparked a die-in over poor safety protection. These deaths are not the fault of London's bike-share scheme, of course. The arguable culprit there is London’s cycle lane network, which provides the illusion of safety with its conspicuous blue markings, but offers no real, segregated protection from motor vehicles. Searching for solutions, there may be some sense in Mayor Boris Johnson’s demand that cyclists pay better attention to the law, but it’s hardly the sort of message that gives people the confidence to get back on their bikes.

Those who still feel safe enough to use the bikes may still not locate or re-dock one easily, as docking stations often empty or fill entirely. The daily shift of bikes from outer stations to the center is inevitable, and supposed to be corrected by regular redistribution. Yet it seems Boris Bikes have developed a lackluster reputation over the years in this regard.

None of this would matter much if London’s scheme was entirely self-sustaining. But while Paris's bike-share scheme actually makes money for the city, London's 4,000 bikes cost local taxpayers an average of £1,400 per bike per year. As the Daily Mail points out, this would be enough to buy each of the scheme's 38,000 registered users a £290 bike. Barclays has thus found its sponsorship deal a mixed publicity blessing – though the bank itself may be part of the problem. The £50 million it promised was never going to be enough, and the amount it has actually handed over so far suggests their ultimate contribution could be at little as half that.

Still, there's life in London's bike-share scheme yet. In fact, the scheme plans to expand its scope next spring, introducing 2,000 more bikes and expanding docking stations into Southwest London. And though it was actually his predecessor's idea, bike-share is too tied to Mayor Johnson's legacy for him to let it fail without a fight.

London bike-share's difficult adolescence shows how creating a system isn’t enough. If you want to change a city's transit habits, you need an extensive, safe cycle network to encourage people to keep using it once the novelty has worn off.

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Permalink Reply by Skip Montanaro 0mi on December 12, 2013 at 4:23pm

Three possible factors were mentioned: recent price increases, a rash of deaths, and poor maintenance. Concluding from one month's year-over-year numbers that the system is in trouble is nuts. It seems true they have problems, but there's no indication how long ridership has been falling, or any correlation with recent events which almost certainly would depress ridership, at least for a short period.

Permalink Reply by Joe Guzzardo on December 12, 2013 at 4:45pm

Thanks Ace for a very well written and thoughtful post. I'm wondering too if the weather had any impact? I'm sure it was a combination of circumstances. If we raised gas taxes to a more appropriate level, that factored in better environmental and energy imperatives as well as health and safety concerns we'd be doing ourselves a big favor. This idea has long been on the table but I would temper it by offering tax breaks to people/companies who's livelihood depended directly on transportation and better incentives to use public transportation. You can do a lot with an enlightened tax policy. The British managed to avoid the French revolution by taxing landowners to the point where they had to sell off their holdings.

Permalink Reply by Joe Guzzardo on December 12, 2013 at 4:53pm

Well, the Brits were never known for making great cars, Aston Martin and Rolls Royce aside, so maybe it's a little bit too much to expect them to make a good public bike utility.


h' 1.0 said:

I did spend kind of a stupid amount of time searching, and found November 2012 temps were higher than November 2013 for the most part:


Could not find historical info on snow accumulation.

I found a mention that a Barclay-Bike has to be docked for 5 minutes before you can take it out again. That's unusual and pretty damn prohibitive IMO.

Skip Montanaro 12mi said:

Three possible factors were mentioned: recent price increases, a rash of deaths, and poor maintenance. Concluding from one month's year-over-year numbers that the system is in trouble is nuts. It seems true they have problems, but there's no indication how long ridership has been falling, or any correlation with recent events which almost certainly would depress ridership, at least for a short period.

Permalink Reply by Joe Guzzardo on December 12, 2013 at 6:15pm

Hmmm, interesting. Also keep in mind those temps are Centigrade not Fahrenheit so the differences are larger than would appear to an American at first glance and may have had an impact. I don't imagine London City would be much different from London Heathrow.

Clearly though, you would have done well had you sold the Nov 2012 temperature on Tuesday the 12th and then closed out the short sale on Friday, Nov 30. (I work in the securities industry, so please forgive me.)



h' 1.0 said:

I did spend kind of a stupid amount of time searching, and found November 2012 temps were higher than November 2013 for the most part:


Could not find historical info on snow accumulation.

I found a mention that a Barclay-Bike has to be docked for 5 minutes before you can take it out again. That's unusual and pretty damn prohibitive IMO.

Skip Montanaro 12mi said:

Three possible factors were mentioned: recent price increases, a rash of deaths, and poor maintenance. Concluding from one month's year-over-year numbers that the system is in trouble is nuts. It seems true they have problems, but there's no indication how long ridership has been falling, or any correlation with recent events which almost certainly would depress ridership, at least for a short period.

Permalink Reply by Kevin Mulcky on December 13, 2013 at 2:18am

Maybe all the bike-share riders bought their own bikes?

Permalink Reply by globalguy on December 13, 2013 at 2:32am

Actually, it's rather straightforward and should be a big RED FLAG for all things "bikey" in Chicago's future. London's Mayor, Boris Johnson, has done squat to make the program self-sufficient and Barclay's will end its sponsorship in 2015.  At least London has dedicated bike transportation professionals in its gov't.

Permalink Reply by Reboot Oxnard on December 13, 2013 at 7:30am

This appears to be a part, but only a part, of the decline. A lot of folks tried the hire-bikes for a year or two and graduated themselves on to their own bike. Good news for cycling, bad news for the hire scheme.

There have been consistent complaints, however, that there are too many racks without bikes, that there aren't enough racks, that the bikes are in bad shape and that that cost is too high. Ridership was falling, albeit only slightly, prior to the rates being doubled which seems to have caused them to drop like a stone.



Kelvin Mulcky said:

Maybe all the bike-share riders bought their own bikes?

Permalink Reply by Mike Schwab on December 14, 2013 at 12:37am

1400 pounds per bicycle for bicycles that are ridden 5 hours a day?  Fairly low maintenance.

Permalink Reply by Reboot Oxnard on December 14, 2013 at 3:20am

Realistically or not, the goal of the London program was that it would be self-sufficient, at least independent of any tax dollars beyond support for capital and infrastructure costs. The sponsorship and the usage fees were supposed to be enough cash to cover the operating expenses. TfL does a lot of polling and one of the complaints the public has about the program is that it is costing the taxpayer money when they were told it wouldn't. Juxtaposed is a complaint from the users that the increased fee structure makes cycling expensive enough that many people would rather take public transit. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, perhaps, but if one of the reasons the program was succeeding was because it was cheaper than public transit, I'm not certain how long it will be able to survive without government spending tax dollars to support it. Hell, let me rephrase that: I'm certain the program(me) can't survive without government spending tax dollars to support it.

 
h' 1.0 said:

Well.... is the goal of such a program to ultimately be self-sufficient?

I read (possibly in the linked article) that there is little data available as to what sort of revenue any of the bike share programs actually generate (would love to be corrected on that)..... but I don't know how we leaped to the idea that a bike share program is supposed to be profitable enough to be completely self-sustaining. Divvy was presented as a transit option, a "last mile" solution to complement bus and commuter rail..... I don't see much criticism of Metra or CTA for not being completely self-sustaining.
 
globalguy said:

Actually, it's rather straightforward and should be a big RED FLAG for all things "bikey" in Chicago's future. London's Mayor, Boris Johnson, has done squat to make the program self-sufficient and Barclay's will end its sponsorship in 2015.  At least London has dedicated bike transportation professionals in its gov't.

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