This final bit of analysis of Capital Bikeshare is here just in case anybody in Vienna actually believes the cheerleader-style reporting you may read regarding Capital Bikeshare.
Here’s the actual use of the Bikeshare racks around Tysons, for the past 12 months. To understand this, realize that the underlying unit of data is a “trip leg”. It’s a transport of a bicycle from one rack to another, or, in the case of a round trip, from one rack back to that same rack. E.g. if you rode one of these bikes from the Metro station to work in the morning, and then back in the evening, that would be two trip-legs.
To get a better estimate of the actual number of users, I divide trip-legs by two to get “trips”. (Except for round-trips, for which each one counts as a trip). I’m betting that in most cases, this is a far better estimate of the number of unique users on any given day.
Then, I divided these 12-month totals by 365 to get them on a per-day basis.
The upshot is that, on a typical day, the entire Capital Bikeshare investment in the Tyson’s Metro area — 14 racks, total of 170 bike slots, and an unknown number of bikes — typically benefits six people.
Let me point out that this is a mostly-mature system at this point. Most of those racks have been there for years now. And let me further point out that it looked just like that the last time I analyzed the data for Tysons Metro in isolation. And it looks like this out in the far Maryland ‘burbs as well. And in Reston.
If you can look at that, and say, oh, boy, let’s spend a quarter-mil to install those in my Town — then let’s pay Lyft (the owner of the company that operates Capital Bikeshare) whatever annual maintenance they charge, on top of that.
If you can say that, then I think you and I live in alternative realities.
I don’t even care if it’s somebody else’s tax dollars paying for it. Building more of these, when we already know what the outcome looks like out here in the exurbs, is just the worst kind of government.
In case anybody wants to check my work — nobody ever does — the underlying data are here: https://ride.capitalbikeshare.com/system-data.
Finally, let me reiterate that in the central urban core of the DC area, Capital Bikeshare is a fine idea and it works well. (I’ve said that in almost all of my prior posts on this topic, and repeat it here to be sure that you understand I am not anti-bike or anti-Capital-Bikeshare.) The heavy use of the bikes in that area contributes to a reasonable cost-per-ride. But in those areas, a) there are lots of nearby places to go from and to, where racks can be sited, and b) as I recall, a typical bike rack slot turns over an average of six times a day.
In other words, there are maybe two-orders-of-magnitude more riders per bike slot in the dense urban core than in the far-flung suburbs. Bikeshare provides value in that urban core. It does not out here.
Realistic transportation policy needs to recognize that and be shaped accordingly. Early on, local governments could be forgiven for taking a chance on a technology that, in hindsight, just doesn’t work out here. Now, by contrast, with all the accumulated evidence, there’s no longer any excuse. We know it doesn’t work, in the sense of having an outrageous average cost per mile of transportation, due to negligible use rates. Why are we still expanding it?
