Bike-sharing plan is ill conceived

After looking at the July 5 vote on a bike rental contract with Decobike, one has to wonder if any member of the City Council voting for this has ever ridden a bike in Long Beach. The concept of renting out 400 bicycles per day — bikes that most riders will operate alongside vehicular traffic — is not only dangerous, but it is so ill conceived that one has to question the motivation behind this.

The official line is that this will generate $300,000 a year in revenue for the city and as much as $5 million for Decobike. Simple math, however, makes this hard to believe. If each of the 400 bicycles are rented every single day of a 140-day biking season, it would mean that every bike would have to generate $90 a day to make this kind of money.

The idea that each bike will be rented every single day is pure fantasy at best and defies any type of business logic. The idea that all 140 days of the season will be ideal for bicycle riding defies reality, while the expectation that people are willing to pay this kind of money for a bike rental that would generate this type of revenue defies economics. Yet simple math shows us that these are the numbers that are needed in order to generate this type of fantasized revenue. 

Another reason given for this program was that it would reduce automobile traffic in the city. Yet that argument to makes no sense. How are people going to get to the 30 or 40 rental kiosks? The truth is that if they live in Long Beach, they most likely already have a bike and won’t be renting one. If they’re from out of town and take the train, they wouldn’t have cars in the first place so there is no reduction in traffic. If they drive into Long Beach, there will be more traffic, therefore completely contradicting the secondary purpose of this deal.

The worst part of this plan, though, is the idea of putting 400 more bikes onto the streets of Long Beach prior to demarcating bike lanes to accommodate them. It is analogous to putting on a swim race in a pool prior to filling it with water. We have, for years, been urging city officials to establish rational bike lanes. Ask anybody who rides in the city and they will tell you how dangerous it is. While Long Beach has more bike riders per capita than any other municipality in New York state, our bike lanes remain a joke.

We do have nice ones on Broadway, where, unfortunately, every motorist feels they can double park. Ask any bicyclist if they have ever seen one of these motorists get a ticket and the answer will most likely be no. We also have a bike lane on the boardwalk that, in reality, is ignored by most pedestrians — and which is made all the more dangerous by the severely deteriorating condition of the boardwalk.

The city claims that one of the benefits of this five-year lease agreement is that Decobike will install bike lanes next year. The truth is, putting in a bike lane is relatively inexpensive, since the only real requirement is paint. The difficult part is the planning and the neighborhood acceptance. Neither Decobike nor the city has given us any indication of what the bike lanes will look like or where they will be located.

While I think it’s a wonderful idea to get people out of their cars and onto bikes, the first step should be to have a place for people to ride before we put 400 more bikes onto already dangerous and overcrowded streets.

Roy Lester is a longtime Long Beach resident and vice president of the Board of Education.