Tag Archives: Bicycles

Bird, the Uber of the electric scooter world, has deployed its first 50 scooters in Virginia — in Arlington County, to be specific. Arlington has no official policy regarding electric scooters, and Bird placed its black-and-white scooters without county permission. Whether that becomes a problem remains to be seen.

“We will be having discussions with the county manager and the county attorney’s office on how to respond to Bird’s deployment of electric scooters in Arlington,” county spokesman Eric Balliet wrote in an email to the Washington Business Journal.

Bird, a California company that has raised $400 million in venture capital backing, has announced plans to expand into 50 new cities by the end of the year. The service works like this: Users download an app that identifies where unused scooters are located. Passengers ride the scooters wherever they want. Bird requires riders to wear helmets and stay off of sidewalks, but has no mechanism to enforce the requirements — a source of contention in some municipalities. At the end of the day, Bird picks up the scattered scooters and places in them locations where they are most likely to be used the next morning.

Bird’s Save Our Sidewalks pledge lays out the company’s thinking:

We’re witnessing the biggest revolution in transportation since the dawn of the Jet Age. From car ride-sharing to bike-sharing to autonomous and electric vehicles of all kinds, an explosion of innovation stands to transform the cities in which live, improve the environment, and help get us from Point A to Point B.

The sharing of bikes, e-bikes, e-scooters, and other short-range electric vehicles to solve the “last-mile” problem is an important part of this transformation. We have an unprecedented opportunity to reduce car trips –especially the roughly 40 percent of trips under two miles — thereby reducing traffic, congestion, and greenhouse gas emissions.

Smaller-than-automobile ride sharing is not without a downside, acknowledges Bird. “We have all seen the results of out-of-control deployment in China — huge piles of abandoned and broken bicycles, over-running sidewalks, turning parks into junkyards, and creating a new form of pollution,” states the Save Our Sidewalks pledge. To avoid having such things happen to the U.S., Bird vows:

• The company will retrieve all vehicles from city streets every night, inspect vehicles for maintenance and repairs, and re-position the entire fleet to where they scooters be wanted the next day.
• It will not increase the number of vehicles in a city unless they are being used on average at least three times per day (weather permitting). The company will remove underutilized vehicles, and it will share its data with cities for purposes of verification.
• Bird will remit $1 per vehicle per day to city governments so they can use the money to build more bike lanes and promote safe riding.

I have no idea how many people will cotton to the idea of riding electric scooters. But Bird is taking the financial risk, so I’m not worried about it. For the public, Bird’s approach sounds like a no-lose proposition — especially if scooter riders avail themselves of the ever-expanding bicycle infrastructure. Take Richmond for example. The city has been adding bicycle lanes (see Steve Haner’s recent post on the Franklin Street bike lanes), but it appears that the bike lanes are expanding faster than bicycle ridership. If bike lanes are under-utilized — and they seem way under-utilized to me — cities should be delighted to see them employed by a bicycle-compatible transportation mode like scooters.

Bird has only so much capital to deploy so many scooters in so many cities. I don’t know how it prioritizes markets for entry, but I presume that it would consider the percentage of young people, density, availability of mass transit, and the prevalence of bicycle lanes and other scooter-friendly infrastructure. Oh, yeah, and one more thing. An expressed desire by city officials to collaborate with the company — which Arlington, despite its preference for non-automobile transportation modes, has yet to provide. Richmond, Roanoke, and Norfolk should be stumbling over themselves to get in line for the next deployment of Bird scooters.

The more transportation choices the better.

Alexandria street scene. (Image credit: Wall Street Journal.)

by James A. Bacon

The bicycle wars are coming to Virginia as cyclists literally fight to take back the streets.

For decades the issue was settled — the streets belonged to automobiles, with pedestrians confined to sidewalks as second-class citizens. Bicycles didn’t figure into street design at all. But those days are over as increasingly assertive cyclists agitate to carve out space for bicycle lanes and bicycle parking.

In an op-ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal, F.H. Buckley conveys a flavor of the struggle for King Street in Alexandria. The City of Alexandria has proposed taking away the street’s parking spaces to make way for a bike lane. Buckley portrays his neighbors and himself as victims of politically organized biking activists who utilize blogs and Twitter to mobilize for public protests and City Council hearings. 

Homeowners feel aggrieved because they are accustomed to having free parking on their streets. “We’re really attached to our parking spot,” Buckley writes. “We like to tell our friends to drop by anytime. We don’t want to send out plumbers to park a few blocks over, on streets that are already congested.” The city’s response — get visitors a special parking permit from city hall, or hire valet parking — is not geared to sooth homeowners’ distress.

Buckley sees this local controversy, not inaccurately, a part of a “growing national movement that pits local homeowners and businesses against cyclists and their trendy allies on city councils.”

The cyclist retort is that American streets once were open to all comers — cars, pedestrians, cyclists… even horses and buggies. But in the pre-World War II era, access was increasingly restricted to cars. Over time, urban transportation arteries took on an entirely new look as street widths, lane widths, turning radii and parking spaces were configured for the exclusive care and feeding automobiles. In a highly political process, local boards and councils advanced the automobile agenda street by street. Now the wheel (so to speak) is turning.

Sad to say, the King Street bicycle controversy seems destined to get emotional because the struggle over public space is a zero-sum game — space for bicycles comes from space formerly dedicated to cars. There seems to be little room for compromise.

Personally, I am a big proponent of making urban communities more bicycle friendly. But having been an urban homeowner in a neighborhood with a parking shortage, I am also sympathetic to homeowners distraught at the prospect of losing parking spaces. Homeowners feel that they have a “right” to parking in their neighborhoods — perhaps not always directly in front of their houses, but at least within a reasonable distance. No one likes parking a block or more away and carrying home grocery bags in the rain. (My wife cited precisely that reason as justification for moving to the suburbs to a house with an attached garage.) Likewise, bicyclists don’t want to pay for access to public streets. Cars drive for free (unless you count the taxes drivers pay), why shouldn’t they?

Here is the root problem: If an asset, such as space on a public street, is publicly owned, people will fight over that space in the political arena. One group’s gain means another group loses. There is no win-win here, only win-lose.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but there has to be something than better than one side triumphing over the other through raw political power. Perhaps there is some way to convert parking spaces into a form of property that can be bought, sold, traded, bartered and even condemned through eminent domain. In an ideal world, the space would evolve to its highest and greatest use as measured by how much people are willing to pay to use it. Of course, that won’t satisfy either homeowners or cyclists who think they have a right to access that valuable urban space for free.

If we don’t find a better way, neighborhood battles over cylists’ rights to the road will get ugly and bitter, and the ill feelings engendered actually could impede what cyclists desire, which is the integration of bikes into the fabric of urban transportation. Cyclists need to remember — there are a lot  more homeowners and motorists than cyclists. If the bicycle wars get too polarized, the homeowners and motorists likely will win.

Update: Tanya Snyder over at D.C. Streets Blog blasts the Buckley op-ed. “When there are too many cars for the roads in your town, the problem is that there are too many cars — not that there are too few roads. Eliminating the one sliver of roadway where people are riding bikes is not going to solve motorists’ problems.”