An interesting development today. From Marcus Howard’s blog post Bike share program coming to Savannah at the Savannah Morning News:
Chatham Area Transit is preparing to rollout a pilot bike share program to begin in conjunction with the completion of renovation work to the downtown transit center on Oglethorpe Avenue in September.
A bike dock/station that can hold up to eight bicycles is to be housed at the transit center.
From Howard’s post, it’s clear that CAT hopes some other partners — possibly the city and/or county governments — will help expand the program.
There’s a cost of $70,000/year noted in the post, but it’s hard to see how managing a program this small could cost anywhere near that much once the startup infrastructure is in place. [Apparently the $70,000 figure includes the startup costs. The ongoing program would cost far less.]
CAT director Ramond Robinson envisions potential users taking a bus into town and renting a bike to head out to dinner, and I suppose we could see some folks do things like that.
But it’s hard to see many folks interested in roundtrip bike excursions from the transit center, especially at the minimum $3.25 per hour rental cost cited in the post.
A number of points:
- The transit center is located in an area of town that is extremely unfriendly to cyclists, especially casual ones that don’t know downtown streets well. Many years ago, when the transit center location was a topic of major controversy, I publicly stated my preference for putting it in a rebuilt garage next to the courthouse which would also allow for retail on Broughton. That would have truly put those arriving at the center in the heart of the city.
- It’s hard to imagine anyone, with the possible exception of a few hotel guests in the neighborhood, walking to the transit center just so they can get a bike.
- It’s hard to imagine anyone driving to the transit center and then taking a bike further into town. The added time would likely be more than the time of just parking somewhere downtown — there’s pretty much always on-street parking south of Oglethorpe — and walking to their destination.
- I’ve seen a couple of comments already from some who hope that SCAD will get involved, but a massive number of SCAD students already have their own bicycles — sometimes the racks near places like SCAD’s library on Broughton are so packed that it’s hard to find room. Still, it’s at least possible that occasional students could walk up from the dorms and rent a bike, but with 2.5 hour studio classes, the cost of using the bikes for going to class would get excessive really fast. Perhaps if a program were literally designed in conjunction with SCAD and had stations at some of the college’s key buildings, we could see relatively heavy use.
All those cautions aside, I see no major reason for CAT not to move ahead and give this a try.
But I’m concerned that the logistics of the program are inviting failure. If that happens, some area residents will just say that we tried and encourage officials to abandon the idea entirely.
On the other hand, this could spur officials to consider a few other stations around downtown, which would allow for considerably more consumer flexibility. Then it might take off, in some relatively limited way.
I would be curious to hear in the comments from anyone who thinks they would likely use this program as conceived so far.