As New York’s Bike Share Fixes Failures, It Needs to Cope With Success! This isn’t a software problem. Rather, this is a problem common to all bikeshare schemes, but which is more extreme in NYC for various reasons. The East Village, for instance, is a largely residential neighborhood; lots of people want to bike from there, in the mornings, to go to work or just about their day, but few people want to bike to there, in the mornings. As a result, the bike stations empty out quickly. This is a problem which can’t be fixed by debugging software; indeed, it can’t even be fixed by installing more bike stations. NYC’s bikeshare scheme might not cover a huge amount of the city, but where it exists, it has the highest station density of any municipal bikeshare scheme in the world. And as station density increases, people are more likely to grab a convenient bike and ride it to somewhere more central — even when they’re just riding a few blocks to the nearest subway station. Right now Citi Bike services some of the richest parts of New York—midtown and lower Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn and Williamsburg. These are also the parts of New York that are already very well served by existing transportation, including the subway. I don’t think a taxpayer in the South Bronx or East New York—more remote and poorer parts of the city—should be subsidizing a bike share system they will probably never use. Bike sharing is a nice amenity—especially if it works—but I’d rather see that money spent on subways and bus lines.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 21:49:51 +0000
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