Geekwire reports an unsettling story that the City of Seattle’s Pronto bike-share service will shutter on March 31. “In October 2014, Pronto Cycle Share debuted as a public-private partnership. In 2015, the City Council set aside $5 million to expand the program. But plans changed after Pronto reported that it was “insolvent” due to operating losses ($1.2 million of debt) and low ridership numbers a controversial and ultimately unsuccessful program in Seattle, with fewer-than-expected members signing up to rent bicycles on-demand to get around the city.”
The city last year intended to buy out the bike-share program and relaunch the service with electric bikes. This year instead the funding will be used for expanded pedestrian and bicycle facilities.“This shift in funding priorities allows us to make critical bicycle and pedestrian improvements — especially for students walking and biking to school,” Mayor Murray said in a statement. “While I remain optimistic about the future of bike share in Seattle, today we are focusing on a set of existing projects that will help build a safe, world-class bicycle and pedestrian network.”
This failure is in contrast to the success of Seattle car shares, which has had fantastic growth, or the launch of bike share in Portland where the “recently-launched bike-share program is off to a hot start.”
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.
Seattle never figured out how to deal with the helmet issue and that is likely one of the main reasons why it failed. While Vancouver’s Mobi helmet solution isn’t perfect, I think it has worked quite well and one of the reasons why Mobi seems to be doing well.
Also, Vancouver’s downtown seems to have much better cycling infrastructure than Seattles.
I think some parts of downtown Seattle also have much steeper hills than Vancouver or Portland.
We’ve been to Seattle twice when it had its bikeshare but we didn’t use it since we had our own bikes.
Some of their much steeper hills than Vancouver’s, rise immediately from a busy downtown car streets. For locals, it’s probably workable for bikeshare use since they would know ways to make it easier for themselves (a different route) or simply practice.
However for visitors, unless they are strong cyclists, visitors on a bike share, would be limited in certain downtown sections..which one wonders if there are enough bikeshare stations. There are great cycling routes . At least on the Burke-Gilman Trail there were some docking stations…
We may forget that in a strange, big city downtown with lots of car traffic and transit buses, on same road, if there are no separated bike lanes, it’s just more intimidating for visitors unfamiliar with car traffic patterns, etc.
There is something to be said about bike share station density being important. I find here that there are so many stations a person can get around and find a place to dock close to where they’re going pretty easily.
I used Pronto in Seattle but it was inconvenient. Finding a station once you go to where the map said there was supposed to be one was hard since they were usually hidden around a corner. I eventually just gave up on it and used transit which worked out much better.
There are some steep hills in Seattle however like Vancouver, there are large areas that within them don’t have many hills so getting around by bike within these areas could potentially be nice. They need to really increase their cycling infrastructure though. More greenways and protected bike lanes. Like here they also have to get rid of that helmet law.