The shuttered RVA Bikeshare station at the Battery Park Pool. Image by the author.

Since RVA Bikeshare expanded to the North Avenue branch library around a year and a half ago, Richmond resident Kevin Facklam has been using the bikes to run errands, get in shape, and ride around Northside with friends. When he went to unlock a bike on May 22, however, all he found was a notice on the system’s website stating, “As of now, it is no longer possible to unlock bikes. We will provide further notice if the system reopens.”

The ominous “if” in that statement has left Facklam and other RVA Bikeshare users concerned and frustrated that the system may never reopen.

“That would have a negative impact on me as somebody who doesn’t have their own bike but wants to increase my physical activity,” said Facklam. “I can’t run right now due to a recent surgery, so biking is a good low-impact exercise for me. I want to hop on the bikes to eliminate a car ride downtown, but now I can’t.”

The May 22 shutdown of the system proved all the more perplexing because the Department of Public Works — the city agency which oversees RVA Bikeshare — not only failed to offer users any warning of the coming closure but actually advertised its availability to Richmonders just three days prior on National Bike to Work Day.

After a flurry of bad press, DPW released a statement blaming RVA Bikeshare’s abrupt closure on “a last-minute, two day notice and shut down by Bewegen Technologies,” the system’s third-party operator. In contrast to DPW’s account of the process leading to closure, other cities that had contracts with Bewegen were notified in March of the coming disruption and alerted bikeshare users as early as mid-April.

Raleigh on the right track

Such a timeline tracks with the experience of Barbara Godwin, the City of Raleigh’s bicycle and pedestrian program manager. In an interview, she stated that Bewegen made her office aware of the need for a transition plan “in the first couple weeks of March.” Raleigh’s Cardinal Bikeshare then ceased operations one month later in April after a system assessment was conducted by Corps Logistics, a local veteran-owned transportation firm.

With 32 stations and over 330 bikes in service, Cardinal Bikeshare is roughly 50% larger than RVA Bikeshare and one of the largest that Bewegen operated around the world. Since Raleigh — like Richmond — owns the bikes, stations, and other hardware, all they needed to reopen was to secure a new third-party operator to handle the system’s maintenance, operations, and customer service. They found that in Corps Logistics and reopened Cardinal Bikeshare on June 7.

“Our number one priority was always to get the bikeshare back up and running because it is an important and — up until this point — reliable form of transportation for people,” Godwin said. “We certainly felt that it was our job to get this reopened as quickly as possible so that people who use it every day and those who come to our city have this transportation option available.”

Since Cardinal Bikeshare was closed for nearly two months, the City of Raleigh decided to offer users free access to the system for 60 days to make up for lost time.

“Due to the sudden closure of the system we felt that it was only right to offer that time lost back to the people who want to use our system and who need our system,” said Godwin. “That was an easy decision for us to give all of our Cardinal Bikeshare users and potential new users the opportunity to gain that time back with a ride credit for 60 days.”

Other localities that once partnered with Bewegen to run their bikeshare systems have also relaunched their systems. In Park City, Utah, local officials built out an in-house team to run the service. In Tartu, Estonia, the city went the Raleigh route and simply contracted a new third-party operator to reopen on June 2.

While DC’s Capital Bikeshare recently celebrated a new ridership record, Richmond residents are worried that local leaders may just let RVA Bikeshare die. Unlike their counterparts in other cities, officials with Richmond’s DPW refuse to even provide an update to city residents on the return of RVA Bikeshare.

There is at least one person willing to work towards a relaunch of Richmond’s bikeshare system, but she ironically lives in Raleigh.

“If there’s any information that we can talk through with Richmond that helps them,” said Godwin, “I’m always open for that.

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Tagged: bicycling, bikeshare, budget, government, parking, public safety, raleigh, richmond, roads, scooters, transit, virginia

Wyatt Gordon is the senior policy manager for land use and transportation at the Virginia Conservation Network, and an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Urban Planning. He's a born-and-raised Richmonder with a master's in Urban Planning from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and a bachelor's in International Political Economy from American University.