How Capital Bikeshare launched a mobility movement

The concept of bikeshare as we know it almost died with a failed attempt in DC in 2008. However, in Part II of my series on the history of bikeshare in the Washington region, I will walk us through how we arrived at the bikeshare system as we know it today.

Making Montreal’s system ours

With Paul DeMaio’s blog promoting Montreal’s innovations, the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) decided to organize a fact-finding trip. Sebastian and his colleague Chris Holben came back enthusiastic. Not only was Montreal’s government highly supportive, but it had found a way around the cost and complexity of hard-wiring the stations to the electrical grid–by using solar panels.

“The Montreal winter is so cold that they need to take the stations out for a few months,” then DC Bike Coordinator Jim Sebastian recounted, “and they certainly didn’t want to dig up the streets each time. That’s what stimulated their creativity. Even though solar panels take up more space, they make the stations much easier to install and move.”

During all this time, Arlington County, led by DeMaio, Commuter Services Chief Chris Hamilton, Transportation Director Dennis Leach and County Board member Jay Fisette, had been maintaining its strong interest in having a bikeshare program, too. After all, Arlington was right across the Potomac River and connected to the city by five bikeable bridges. Arlington, however, did not have statutory authority to allow advertising on bus shelters, so it couldn’t use the same funding approach as the District.

“I’d always been a big advocate of the idea,” recollects Jay Fisette, “but Arlington didn’t have a financial angle to make it work. I give [then DDOT director] Gabe Klein a lot of credit—he jumped right on it. The first one was a limited system but it was an inexpensive way to get started, and it got people thinking. Then, when we found the better program out of Montreal, I was adamant that we needed to integrate with the District. Our goal was not only bikeshare but also having DC use our same system.”

By 2008, Arlington had a request for proposals in the works for system operators, and it added DC’s Sebastian to its selection committee just in case the two governments might come into sync.

The Arlington bid, asking for an operator to help build a local version of the Montreal system, was won the following year by a company named Alta Planning and Design, and DC officials soon decided to join in with the venture. (Since all area jurisdictions belong to the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, any contract can be expanded geographically simply by using a legal rider.)

Capital Bikeshare (often shortened to just CaBi) began on September 20, 2010.

“We had a ceremony in front of US Department of Transportation,” says Charlie Denney, former staffer with Alta. “When it was over, everyone jumped on a bikeshare bike and pedaled off in all directions to park at one of the first 49 racks that had been installed around town.”

From moment to movement

The program began slowly, but through word-of-mouth and some promotions it took off the following spring. Hundreds of local residents bought annual memberships, providing them with easy-to-use fobs that enabled free use of any bikeshare bike for up to 30 minutes (and then continued free 30-minute use by returning the bike and taking another). Tourists could purchase inexpensive single-day passes. And each station had a map indicating where the other stations were located for ending a journey, parking the bike and walking off. By the first anniversary of the opening, Bikeshare was just about to clock its millionth use.

However, a major fly in the ointment was the refusal of the National Park Service (NPS) to participate. With the 571-acre National Mall in the center of the city and a major tourist destination (as well as more than 6,000 other NPS acres in the city), the absence of Bikeshare stations between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial was a huge handicap and inconvenience. Bicycle advocates from both the city and the Park Service quickly rose to the challenge of trying to change the policy.

“The Park Service is a natural resource agency with roots in the West and a reluctance to change precedents,” explained Eliza Voigt, former NPS planner for the National Mall. “Their concession policy is pretty inflexible. When they heard ‘bikes,’ they immediately thought ‘rentals’ and said that their concession agreement didn’t allow that. It took a while to show them that Bikeshare wasn’t a rental concession, it was a transit option—just like the Circulator bus going up and down the mall.”

Voigt added, “It helps to be in a city. There are so many users and so much need. Eventually, everyone realized that it would be a great benefit to partner with the city.”

Now, the Mall features most of the highest-use Capital Bikeshare stations in the entire system. (This statistical gem is known due to the fact that, under its contract, CaBi must make available to the public voluminous amounts of data concerning the times, starting and ending points of every trip.)

Capital Bikeshare now has seven member jurisdictions: Washington, DC (which joined 2010), Arlington (2010), Alexandria (2012), Montgomery County (2013), Fairfax County (2016), Prince George’s County (2018), Falls Church (2019). With more than three million uses a year, it is the third-largest bikeshare system in the US, after New York and Chicago.

“What’s unique about the Washington situation is that it involves regional cooperation between so many different jurisdictions and states,” said Denney, formerly with Alta. “As a matter of fact, when you look at other issues, this kind of cooperation is very rare even here.”

As of 2022, the cost to users ranges from $95 for a yearly membership down to a $1 unlocking fee plus a nickel per minute for a single ride. The yearly membership provides an unlimited number of 45-minute trips with the option of returning the bike for a free replacement every 45 minutes.

Although the system is seamless to the user across all jurisdictions, each government’s contract contains varying amounts of subsidies and financial returns depending on usage. Generally, the governments subsidize the capital costs for equipment and own the equipment in their jurisdiction, while operating costs are handled by the company that replaced Alta, the auto ride-sharing company Lyft.

Beyond the popularity of Capital Bikeshare, another reason for its growth is that the business and apartment building communities themselves gradually began to see its commercial advantages. Sebastian explains, “Even though many of them didn’t want a station directly in front of their entrances, they saw the benefit of having one on their block. And then we started getting letters from Advisory Neighborhood Commissions saying, ‘The next ANC over got one, why can’t we have one, too?’”

Eric Gilliland, a general manager for Alta and, earlier, a director of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association, put it more succinctly. “Studies were done and they showed that having a station nearby was good for business.”

At first, the bikeshare stations were placed on wide sidewalks where they wouldn’t interfere with pedestrians. Later, in more confined situations, they started being located directly in streets. “Sometimes we needed to remove a couple of parking spaces, which was controversial, although it’s obvious how many more bikes fit in the place of a single car. In other cases, we could locate the stations where cars wouldn’t be allowed anyway because of visibility issues near corners. That was win-win.”

But Capital Bikeshare actually keeps giving and giving. A significant outgrowth of its success, particularly in the District, has been a dramatic expansion in the number of striped and protected bike lanes. With so many more cyclists, there is heightened pressure for safer places to ride—and, concomitantly, a numerical justification for making the changes.

“We started by looking for the easier locations,” said Sebastian, “like streets that were too wide for the traffic they carried. That’s what enabled us to take out a lane on 15th Street NW and give it over to a two-way cycle track. And the same thing for our showstopper cycle track down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. That’s becoming world-famous.”

In more difficult situations, car lanes have been narrowed and, most controversially, parking has been eliminated. It’s a perennial balancing act between less roadway for cars versus fewer cars because of the rise in cycling. Also, more cyclists putting themselves in some roadway danger versus slower auto speeds reducing the severity of accidents.

Competition creates new opportunities and challenges

Starting in 2017, Capital Bikeshare’s success began attracting private-sector competitors such as Lime and Bird that provided electric scooters and electric pedal-assist bicycles. Since these companies did not have contracts with local governments to install stations in public space, they utilized an alternative “dockless” model whereby users randomly found and left the equipment wherever they liked, starting and stopping the payment for their journeys using a cellphone app. The cost for these dockless vehicles is considerably higher than for Capital Bikeshare (since the private companies have no government subsidy), but public use of scooters is nevertheless very high.

By 2019, according to the National Association of City Transportation Officials, e-scooter use nationally was about twice as high as bikeshare use. (Numbers specifically for the D.C. area were not available.) The future of these dockless systems is not certain. None of the companies has yet turned an operating profit, and licensing and other fees are likely to lead to higher prices for users.

Because of the competition from dockless e-bikes, Capital Bikeshare in 2018 introduced its own e-bike. Similar in shape to the classic Capital Bikeshare but black rather than red, the e-bike could be docked either at a regular Capital Bikeshare station or locked onto any city bike rack (for an extra fee). However an issue with the brakes of those e-bikes forced them back out of production until they were reintroduced in 2020.

With the system fully controlled through cell phone app technology, the company always knows where its bikes are and when they’re being rented. The hourly rate for an e-bike is three times higher than for a classic two-wheeler, and, with higher usage rates, that particular service appears to be a financial winner. Nevertheless, as a whole, Capital Bikeshare is not a money-making enterprise but rather a public benefit similar to transit.

There are still numerous unanswered questions about Capital Bikeshare—are the bikes displacing auto trips (which would be good) or merely relieving people of walking trips? Are the e-bikes leading to more crashes with pedestrians and vehicles? Is the rise in bike use leading to a decline in auto traffic?—but it appears that shared personal mobility is here to stay and will be an ever-growing component of the Washington transportation scene.