Sexier than Zipcar

WASHINGTON, DC, is treading on Portland’s sacred turf as
America’s most innovative bike city. The nation’s capital followed the
lead of cities like Paris and Barcelona last summer when it launched a
fleet of 120 shared bikes. Now Portland is considering kicking its own
bike-sharing system into gear with 660 bikes that would be rentable
like Zipcars—the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) just
needs to figure out how to pay the $2.64 million startup cost.

Portland has long experimented with the idea of bike sharing. Back
in 1995, grassroots bike activists and the Community Cycling Center
launched the Yellow Bikes Project, which aimed to place 1,000 free
bikes on Portland’s streets. Anyone could ride the bikes around town
for free and many infamously wound up at the bottom of the
Willamette.

This time around, only subscribers with credit card information
safely on file could check out bikes. While the idea is still in the
initial planning stages at PBOT, transit planners are looking
covetously to Paris, where racks of rentable bikes reside every 300
meters in the city, says PBOT Manager Steve Hoyt-McBeth.

“Bike sharing does not have a real robust constituency here at this
point,” says Hoyt-McBeth, “But this could replace some car drivers
long-term since people can try out bike riding.”

Hoyt-McBeth’s exploratory plans recommend placing shared bikes every
few blocks downtown. With all public entities slashing budgets, bike
sharing might have to look elsewhere for its $2.64 million start-up
costs. Last year, the city cancelled its search for a big corporate
vendor who could run the program, but the idea is spinning around
again.

Subscriptions cover 80 percent of other cities’ bike-sharing
programs, says Hoyt-McBeth, but Paris and DC also sold ads on the new
bike racks to cover their steep start-up costs. That approach would be
illegal in Portland thanks to a policy that bans advertisements on
city-owned bike racks downtown. The Rose City’s program might look more
like Barcelona’s, which funds its 6,000 bikes with parking and car
fees.

Two other unsolved hurdles are theft and reassuring inexperienced
tourists. Roughly a third of Paris’s 20,000 shared bikes have been
demolished or disappeared, while bike advocates say unleashing
helmet-less tourists onto Portland’s busiest streets could be a recipe
for disaster without more bike infrastructure.

“It would certainly put significant pressure on the city to invest
in bike infrastructure. You’re not going to have newbies feeling
comfortable biking downtown on streets with all those cars,” says
Jonathan Maus, editor of BikePortland.org.

The city will host bike-sharing demonstrations through August, the
first being downtown at the waterfront on August 14 from 10:30 am-3
pm.