{"id":5952,"date":"2013-07-19T17:52:42","date_gmt":"2013-07-19T21:52:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/?p=5952"},"modified":"2013-07-20T17:43:31","modified_gmt":"2013-07-20T21:43:31","slug":"a-modest-start-for-a-bike-share-program-in-savannah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/2013\/07\/19\/a-modest-start-for-a-bike-share-program-in-savannah\/","title":{"rendered":"A modest start for a bike share program in Savannah"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><div class=\"e26b170012445c56d240655bdd03f7bf\" data-index=\"10\" style=\"float: right; margin:10px 0 10px 10px;\">\n<script async src=\"http:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js\"><\/script>\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:inline-block;width:300px;height:600px\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-5595881567027133\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"8268618372\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script>\n<\/div>\n<br \/>\nAn interesting development today. From Marcus Howard&#8217;s blog post <a href=\"http:\/\/savannahnow.com\/share\/blog-post\/marcus-e-howard\/2013-07-19\/bike-share-program-coming-savannah#.UemTeWT44X4\" target=\"_blank\">Bike share program coming to Savannah<\/a> at the Savannah Morning News:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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.<\/p>\n<p>A bike dock\/station that can hold up to eight bicycles is to be housed at the transit center.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>From Howard&#8217;s post, it&#8217;s clear that CAT hopes some other partners &#8212; possibly the city and\/or county governments &#8212; will help expand the program.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a cost of $70,000\/year noted in the post, but it&#8217;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.]<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>But it&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>A number of points:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The transit center is located in an area of town that is extremely unfriendly to cyclists, especially casual ones that don&#8217;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.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;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.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;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 &#8212; there&#8217;s pretty much always on-street parking south of Oglethorpe &#8212; and walking to their destination.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;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 &#8212; sometimes the racks near places like SCAD&#8217;s library on Broughton are so packed that it&#8217;s hard to find room. Still, it&#8217;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&#8217;s key buildings, we could see relatively heavy use.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>All those cautions aside, I see no major reason for CAT not to move ahead and give this a try.<\/p>\n<p>But I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>I would be curious to hear in the comments from anyone who thinks they would likely use this program as conceived so far.<br \/>\n<div class=\"e26b170012445c56d240655bdd03f7bf\" data-index=\"2\" style=\"float: none; margin:0px 0 0px 0; text-align:center;\">\n<script async src=\"http:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js\"><\/script>\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:inline-block;width:300px;height:250px\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-5595881567027133\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"4374909701\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script>\n<\/div>\n<\/p>\n\n<div style=\"font-size: 0px; height: 0px; line-height: 0px; margin: 0; padding: 0; clear: both;\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An interesting development today. From Marcus Howard&#8217;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&hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"more-link-p\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/2013\/07\/19\/a-modest-start-for-a-bike-share-program-in-savannah\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[8],"tags":[1266,1265,41],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gN9R-1y0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5952"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5952\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.billdawers.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}