Background: Horrendously expensive flop in the ‘burbs
Capital Bikeshare is a short-term bike rental system, currently in the process of expanding in Northern Virginia.
It’s a “docked” bike rental system, meaning that you ride the bikes from one Capital Bikeshare rack to another. Your rental clock starts when you unlock it from the rack of origin, and stops when you lock it into the destination rack. (By contrast, “dockless” systems, common on scooter rentals, allow you to pick up any available vehicle and leave it wherever you end up.)
It’s also best seen as a “quasi-governmental” system. It’s heavily supported by tax revenues from local governments. But it’s not run by those local governments. It’s actually run by private for-profit enterprise. With everything that implies about mixed economic incentives and just who, exactly, is keeping their eye on the value provided for the cost imposed.
Back in 2021, I did an in-depth analysis of this quasi-governmental bike rental agency (Post #1169 and prior posts). That, in turn, was an update of my original analysis in 2019, when the Town of Vienna first started pondering where to put its Capital Bikeshare racks. (You can pull up all of that prior analysis by clicking”Capital Bikeshare” using the “Posts by Category” widget on this page (laptop), or by clicking the three horizontal bars to access that widget, then choosing that category (phone).
In particular, I focused on how heavily it was used, both in the DC core and out here in the far suburbs of Washington DC.
The short answer at the time is that Capital Bikeshare was quite successful in the DC urban core. Those are the big, thick flow lines in the flow diagram above. They represent lots of heavily-used bike rental infrastructure, resulting in a low average cost per bike trip provided.
But note that the further you get from the center of DC, the thinner those lines get. By the time you get as far out as I am (here, the Tyson’s Metro stop), they are hair-thin. A few-trips-a-day thin. This makes Capital Bikeshare a horrendously expensive flop out here in the outer ‘burbs.
Worse, it’s an expensive flop paid for with (somebody else’s) tax money. So nobody seems to want to pay attention to the complete and total lack of value it delivers in this area. And it just marches on, adding even more excess capacity.
I’m an economist, so I don’t use words like “horrendously expensive” on a whim. You can see my last prior post (Post #1169) for a recap of the economics of it. From that post, regarding the Capital Bikeshare presence at our local Tysons’s Metro stop:
... For all of 2019, there were about 5700 trips that used those racks. When I do the math, that comes out to an average operating cost of $35 per half-mile bicycle trip. And that’s assuming that all the capital equipment (racks, bikes, kiosks) is free. The upshot is that by any plausible estimate, the Tyson’s area cost per trip is ghastly. For example, you can buy a Schwinn comfort bike for $300. For the estimated annual operating cost of the Tysons portion of Capital Bikeshare, you could give away about 650 of those bikes, per year. I’d bet that’s far more than the number of people who used those Tysons bike racks in 2019. You could literally give every user a new bike, every year, for what it costs to supply those rental bikes."
From that same post, even for a relatively heavily-used set of rental bikes at our nearby Merrifield Metro, the cost per rental bike trip is more than the cost of an Uber. It’s just a ludicrously expensive way to provide bike transit in the spread-out suburbs.
See this unnumbered post to get a handle on just how low the number of bike trips is, out here in the ‘burbs. That post links to several additional flow-maps, all of which still operate. Instructions are given in the post. But keep an eye on the numbers. We’re talking about devoting all of this infrastructure, so that a handful of people a day can rent a bike. At that time (2019):
In Reston, the largest flow of trips in the AM rush hour is an average of 2 people per work day cycling from the Metro to the Reston Town Center transit station. This is about 1.4 miles, most of which is along the W&OD bike path. All of the Tyson’s stations with the highest volume appear to lie along the W&OD. In Tysons, the largest flow of trips consists of an average of one person per day cycling from the Tyson’s Metro to Westpark and Jones Branch Drive.
Today’s question: The short answer.
Yesterday, the Tyson’s Reporter, one of our local on-line papers, announced that there was going to be even more expansion of Capital Bikeshare in this area. In particular, they’re going to put racks at the Vienna Metro station. Which, as I understand it, is the first stop for the Town of Vienna to get racks installed in Vienna itself.
The obvious question is: How have things changed since my original analysis of 2018 data? To answer that, I downloaded the publicly-available Capital Bikeshare trip data for the 12 months ending October 2022. Then fed that into SAS software to have a look.
The short answer is that the overall situation for Capital Bikeshare deteriorated between 2018 and 2022. Here are the numbers:
Despite a 30 percent increase in installed capacity, ridership fell by 4 percent over the period. I guess with the increase in working from home, that’s not hugely unexpected. And, with a close association with Metro stations out in the ‘burbs, plausibly the still-reduced Metro ridership is also cutting into Capital Bikeshare ridership.
That said, on the face of it, overall, the value proposition for Capital Bikeshare deteriorated markedly since 2018. In effect, the number of paying rides per piece of installed capital fell by about a third over that period.
What about our local stations?
Here, I’m just going to take a crude cut at all Fairfax County VA Capital Bikeshare racks, dividing them broadly into Reston (which really is pretty much just Reston), and “Tysons”, which for this analysis includes Tysons, Merrifield, West Falls Church and anything else along the Metro Silver line.
The bottom line is that the situation in Reston (use compared to capacity) deteriorated to a huge degree. The number of installed slots for bikes far more than doubled, while ridership fell.
For Tysons (broadly construed), things actually picked up a bit, from that 2018 baseline. The number of installed bike rack slots rose just 14%, but ridership picked up 46%. But note that all of that increase occurred years back — the 2019 number cited in the text block above was 5700 trips. The average cost per transport today is actually modestly higher than it was when I did my last (2021) analysis..
Conclusion
To sum it up: No, a miracle did not happen. These outer-suburban rental bike racks are still extremely lightly used. This will continue to result in an outrageously high average cost per trip.
For all the “Tysons” racks, for example, just do the long division. For 2022, that works out to an average of 21 trip-legs per available bike-rack slot per year. In round numbers, those racks are there to support an average of under 2 trips per available bike slot per month. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that these extremely low use rates are going to lead to high average cost per transport.
Is the lack of value going to stop our local governments from expanding Capital Bikeshare? Oh, heck no. It’s all being done with somebody else’s tax dollars. In this case, it’s transportation money ginned up via tolls (?), I think. That money has to get spent. And spent it shall be.
Finally, a disclaimer: I’m not anti-bike, or anti-public-transit. Heck, I moved to Vienna VA so that I could commute to work (in downtown DC) via the DC Metro. For a brief period, I interspersed that with biking to work via our local bike trail (W&OD and connecting trails).
I guess I’m just anti-stupid. Putting in a lot of expensive bike infrastructure at the Tyson’s Metro, so that an average of five people a day can use it, is just fundamentally dumb. And costly.
The fact that this infrastructure looks increasing outdated is just one layer of icing on the cake. These docked systems predate “dockless” technology. And my reading is that all or nearly all the newer shared-mobility systems (bikes or scooters) go dockless. Docked technology is a relic of the last century. That’s on autopilot today, because that’s the technology they started with.
Want to bike where there isn’t a rack, and hang out for a while? You can try it with Capital Bikeshare, but it’s going to cost you dearly. The entire system pricing structure is geared to trips of less than half an hour. After that, penalties apply.
Finally, the fact that it’s earmarked tax dollars, fed into a for-profit bikeshare provider, is just an additional layer of icing on the cake. Nice work if you can get it, I guess. But there’s no way those Tyson’s racks would survive if the users actually had to pay for the full cost of the service.
I am hoping the Town of Vienna will take a clue from the recent introduction of rental scooters. As far as I can tell tell, Vienna allowed those starting a couple of years ago. And nobody showed up. I believe I’ve seen one, in Vienna, in the past year.
But that’s a totally private enterprise. If they can’t make a buck renting scooters out here in the far-flung suburbs, they’ll just go away. By contrast, these taxpayer-financed Capital Bikeshare racks are going to be sitting around for the next couple of decades. Use or no use.
Sure, it’s not a lot of money. Sure, there are subsidies to oil production, and car use, and so on.
That doesn’t make Capital Bikeshare any better a value proposition, out here in the ‘burbs. It was a poor value four years ago, it’s an equally poor value today.
