Every Bus a Bike Station

Scenario 1

Imagine, you're getting ready to head out the door for your morning commute into town - and you're taking MARTA for change. This has not been a practical option for you up until a few weeks ago, since the best bus route leaves you with a good 20-minute walk to the shop where you work. But now that every MARTA bus is "bike station ready", covering that last mile is a breeze, so to speak. So you dial up the Velanta reservation line on your cell phone, punch in your route and stop number and the time that you plan to be there and find out that there will be a bike available for you to use. A few minutes later you tap your Breeze card when you board the bus, well within the 15-minute window that you are allotted, thus securing the bike for the last leg of your trip. When you reach your stop, you tap your Breeze card once more and enter your PIN, releasing a bike on the front of the bus and you're off to the bike station located just across the street from your shop. It occurs to you as you cycle the rest of the way to work that, since your weekday travel plans are pretty predictable, you should update your on-line Velanta profile so that you can take advantage of the "one-touch" reservation service that it offers.

Scenario 2

It's time to start thinking about how you are going to make it to the 1 o'clock meeting uptown, especially if you have to fetch your car off of top deck of the parking garage, so you first take a quick look-see at the velanta.net website to check out your options. You click the button on your personal home page that says "Workplace Scan" and a pop-up window appears that shows a small map of the streets adjacent to your office with the MARTA routes and bus stops displayed. The diagram of each bus stop includes a graphic that indicates the number of bikes available on - and the estimated times of arrival of - each of the next three buses. You see that you have several choices, but, since you are in no rush, you click on the bus stop just up the block that has a bike arriving in 20 minutes. While you're on the Velanta site you decide to go ahead and add the location of your meeting to the "My Starting Locations" list, so it will be that much easier for you to scout out a bike for your return trip, if one is not available at the bike station there. Your bus arrives on schedule and, with a tap of your Breeze card on its external bike carrier, you're off on the 3-mile trip to your meeting.

Scenario 3

You and a friend have just finished a Friday night dinner at a midtown restaurant and you're strolling back home when you remember that there's a concert at the Botanical Garden that you would like to attend. It's too far to walk in time and too much of a hassle to go get your car - even if you could find a parking space when you arrived. Then you notice a MARTA bus approaching with a couple of bikes on the front. Better still, the LED display on the bike carrier indicates that they are "for hire". A couple of Breeze card taps and PIN entries later and you're on the way to Piedmont Park by bike.

Importance of Integration with MARTA and Flexcar

Perhaps the most significant theme that emerged during the Creative Review that EDAW hosted for the Atlanta Bicycle Campaign on Thursday evening of last week was the importance of integrating any public use bicycle program with MARTA and with car-sharing services such as Flexcar. In the course of discussing how a such a system would be augmented by allowing its bikes to be carried on MARTA buses at no additional time charge, Louis Merlin noted that it would also be useful for a rider on a bus to choose to check out a bike that was already on board a bus but not reserved for use. This led me to begin thinking more generally about the concept of buses as mobile bike stations and how they could be critical not only for creating an extensive public bicycle rental program here, but also for expanding the use of our existing public transportation network.

Walk vs. Wait

One of the most daunting challenges in replicating the Paris Velib' system - or even approximating it - is the high bike station density that it has achieved in such a short period of time. Less than six months since its inception it boasts 1,450 stations, each hosting spaces for 15 to 20 bikes. This means that, standing at any point in central Paris, you are within a little over 300 yards from a Velib' station. Now it's hard to imagine that Atlanta would be able to achieve such widespread station siting anytime in the near future, but it is instructive to note that that station spacing translates into about a 3 or 4 minute walk. In other words, it might be useful to re-frame the question, "How far is it to the next bike station?" into "How long is it to the next bike station?" This is where the MARTA buses come in.

Seek vs. Sit

By developing a bike sharing system that is a mixture of fixed and mobile bike stations (e.g. buses) Atlanta maybe be able to achieve the kind of critical station density that is required to make its system successful and to do so much more rapidly than it otherwise could. Although only careful statistical modeling could determine the average time-to-station walk or wait for a hybrid system, I suspect that Atlanta would not achieve a functional station spacing comparable to Paris. That said, such density might not be necessary. As the above scenarios illustrate, when readily available information technologies are exploited, predictable access to a bike within a certain time frame may be as important as finding a bike tout d'suite. Wait 10 minutes and a bike comes to your door.

Leveraging Off Existing Technological Infrastructure

In fact, one of the attractions of a plan that integrates a public use bicycle program with buses, in particular, and with MARTA, more generally, is that much of the technological infrastructure is either already in place or could be extended to accommodate support of such a system. It is not hard to envision the Breeze card, or some successor, doing double duty as both a transit and a bike rental pass.

Partial Support and Maintenance Solution

Another benefit of bus-hosted bike stations, is that some fraction of the bikes, along with the buses themselves, return to a depot location daily. Bikes that have been flagged - electronically - as requiring service could be off-loaded and tended to there. Likewise routine cleaning and tune-ups could be done during such visits. Again, only statistical modeling could predict how much time, on average, would elapse between depot stops for a typical bike, but my guess is that a significant fraction of total maintenance work for the system could be accomplished at depot sites, reducing the number of personnel who would have to be dispatched to service bikes at fixed locations.

Boon for MARTA

A fortuitous consequence of a bike station implementation that relies, in part, on buses is that it addresses the "last mile" challenge that keeps many potential riders from using MARTA. Asking forgiveness for resorting to cliche, it seems to me that there is a genuine synergy between the public transit system as it exists in Atlanta and a public use bike program that makes it possible for riders to complete the last mile or two of their transit trips in under 10 minutes.

This idea is all quite new, and for all I know it's been investigated in great depth elsewhere, perhaps with unfavorable conclusions. It would, though, seem to be a promising direction for ABC and other participants in the Atlanta Velib' process to explore, especially since it seems that it is a solution particularly well suited to both our bicycle transit and tradition public transit needs.