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Catching the e-bike wave

A man with dark hair and sunglasses rides a Capitol Bikeshare bicycle down a painted bike lane near a treelined sidewalk.

Electric bikes have enormous potential to deliver affordable, clean, healthy and space-efficient transportation to the masses, but the feds and too many other leaders are passing up this opportunity in favor of electrifying the status quo.

A man with dark hair and sunglasses rides a Capitol Bikeshare bicycle down a painted bike lane near a treelined sidewalk.

Photo by Elvert Barnes on Flickr.

The best selling type of electric vehicle in the U.S. is traffic-busting, space-efficient, healthy, and doesn’t require a drop of gas—but it’s not an electric car. Talk to anyone who owns an electric bicycle and you’ll get an earful on how practical, fun and life-changing these machines are. You have all the fun of being on a bike, but the power assist makes the hills flat and keeps you from breaking a sweat. E-cargo-bikes make carrying larger loads easy, replacing car-trips to the grocery store and helping to shuttle kids to school and activities. Maybe all this—and their relative affordability—is why, as both markets grow rapidly, e-bike sales continue to outpace electric cars.

The tsunami of e-bikes entering the transportation mix is great news for smart growth. E-bikes and other electric micromobility devices, like electric scooters, are relatively affordable and powerful transportation tools that, like regular bikes, also fit well in dense walkable places. Federal, state and local governments should catch this wave.

Safe infrastructure, parking and incentives

If we’re going to invest public dollars in electric transportation, e-micromobility is a place where we can get equity, environment and smart growth outcomes along with emissions reduction. How do we do it? It comes down to three overarching strategies: safe bike infrastructure, encouraging people to buy and use e-bikes, and creating parking solutions that work for this unique form of transportation.

1. Safe bike infrastructure

Unsafe streets are likely the biggest impediment to e-bike adoption. Safe streets for cycling have always made sense, but the enormous potential of e-bikes is one more reason to invest in these networks. 

Piecemeal efforts with only paint are not enough. We need Complete Streets policies and standards, taking bike accessibility into account with every investment. These policies and standards need to be strong enough to build bike networks that are protected from cars and trucks and connected to destinations. This can and should be applied at every level of government.

2. Encouraging people to buy and use e-bikes

Many states and cities are rolling out e-bike purchase incentive programs to good effect. This makes sense. E-bikes deliver all the benefits discussed above, and they’re much more affordable than cars. For a typical public subsidy on an electric car, you could purchase an e-bike outright. 

Because of their price tag, getting e-bikes and e-cargo bikes into the hands of families that can’t afford a car is a big transportation equity move. People for Bikes’ E-Bike Incentive Design Tool provides guidance for states and cities looking to launch a local program. At the federal level, Congress should pass the E-BIKE Act and help deserving families acquire e-bikes nationwide.

Bikeshare programs are also seeing a lot of success in delivering clean, healthy, space-efficient mobility while exposing more people to the magic of electric bikes. Bikeshare and electric scooter sharing programs are a great complement to public transit, as they can help close first- and last-mile gaps in people’s commutes and give people an additional option for getting around on nights or weekends when transit runs less frequently. Shared micromobility also provides access to these options for people who can’t afford their own e-bike or don’t have a place to store it. Governments at all levels should view shared micromobility as fundamentally a form of public transit and support it with public investment.

To support shared micromobility in the near term, we need a “dig once” approach to installing charging infrastructure for shared micromobility and EV charging infrastructure. That is, when we install charging infrastructure for cars, we should seek opportunities to co-locate car charging infrastructure with charging for shared micromobility. The North America Bikeshare and Scootershare Association (NABSA, a member of the CHARGE coalition that T4America co-leads) recently released a report on co-locating EV and micromobility charging which decision-makers should take heed of. While the Biden Administration’s Joint Office on Energy and Transportation talks a lot about multimodalism, Community Charging Grants in the infrastructure law’s Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) program currently only fund car charging. Really, all federally funded charging infrastructure should be built to charge bikes and scooters too.

3. Parking considerations

E-bikes are heavier and more expensive than regular bikes, and their batteries need to be charged. These differences mean that parking for e-bikes requires special consideration. E-bike parking, especially overnight, needs to be secure. Parking facilities in places like apartment buildings and workplaces need to have level entry, and can’t require the owner to lift the bike onto a hook. Accommodating space for cargo bikes is also becoming more important. Most e-bikes have removable batteries that can be charged in the home or at your desk, so charging in the bike room might not be entirely necessary. Local governments will have to develop bike parking standards that take these special considerations into account and JOET can assist by developing guidance.

The bottom line

The investments needed for us to catch the e-bike wave are relatively modest compared to the pay-off. If we succeed, we’ll be sitting on top of the world! Following the strategies outlined above can help maximize the potential of this small but mighty form of electric transportation.

In our EV blog series, we’ve shared strategies in the zero-emission fleet transition which work in concert with smart growth. These strategies can both advance the EV transition and reduce the need to drive so much. They include electric carshare services, charger-oriented development, the NEVI program, equitable access to chargers, integrating smart parking policy with EV-charging, and electric micromobility. To learn more about reducing transportation emissions, check out our report Driving Down Emissions and go here to learn more about CHARGE, the coalition we co-lead on EV issues.

“Deciding what kind of city we want to be” with the Smart Cities Collaborative

While fighting to stay ahead of a transportation and mobility landscape that changes by the day, 70+ people representing 23 cities gathered in Pittsburgh last week for the third meeting of our Smart Cities Collaborative to band together to solve problems and learn from each other.

While we were in Pittsburgh, Seattle Department of Transportation’s Benjamin de la Peña gave an interview to Seattle Business Magazine about automated vehicles that nails what the Collaborative is all about: “We do not want the technology to decide what kind of city we want to have. We need to decide what kind of city we want and have the technology adapt to that city,” he said.

Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto

This is the core mission of the Smart Cities Collaborative, and why we gathered again for three days in Pittsburgh last week. We were incredibly fortunate to have Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto kick things off for us with a stirring reminder of the aim for all of this work, which was embedded in the motto for their application to USDOT’s Smart Cities Challenge from 2016: “If it’s not for all, it’s not for us.”

Thanks to support from AARP’s Public Policy Institute and Jana Lynott, we started trying to put that maxim into practice right out of the gate with a tour of two particular intersections in Pittsburgh that could stand to have some major improvements made to better serve everyone who needs to use them.

As biking rates continue to go up and eventually shared bikes or scooters from companies like JUMP or Lime roll out, the city will continue having to carefully navigate the tension between allowing a market to develop and thrive, while also ensuring that new options also help the city accomplish their very ambitious goals. Goals like eliminating all traffic fatalities (Vision Zero), giving everyone access to fresh food within 20 minutes without having to use a car, and making every trip under a mile most enjoyably achieved by walking or biking, to name just three.

As the rain poured down, Karina Ricks, the director of Pittsburgh’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure, described some of the challenges with a particular intersection in Pittsburgh to the Collaborative members.

So we toured these two intersections above (during a crazy week of floods in metro Pittsburgh) and then spent some time in a charrette discussing practical design changes for them, the endless tradeoffs that have to be made, and how to prioritize the city’s stated goals and values. How can cities make value-based decisions about what to prioritize? And how do you engage the public when making those difficult decisions?

All too often these days, city transportation departments are just like the surfer desperately fighting just to stay ahead of the break of a mammoth wave. As we heard during one session about e-scooters, they’re here, the cities didn’t ask for them, and it often feels like the challenge is best stated as “they’re here and we have to find a way to deal with them.”

But instead of merely “dealing” with these new services, how can cities work to harness their potential—whether ridesourcing, automated vehicles, bikes and scooters—to accomplish something good and advance their city’s overall values, rather than just avoiding the bad outcomes? And how can cities create flexible regulatory frameworks that can be applied broadly across new mobility models as they develop?

The pace of change is perhaps the biggest part of the challenge. The best way to describe the process when cities roll out a new transit service, for better or for worse, is pretty slow and methodical. Years can pass between the day when someone first drew a new line on a map and the day that a new bus or train starts picking up passengers. But with new mobility options, it feels like the time between ideation and rollout is measured in days, not years.

To better prepare for these new services and this pace of change, we spent the better part of half a day working in groups trying to craft an ideal, holistic policy for shared active transportation—the docked or dockless bikes and scooters that are popping up rapidly in cities from coast to coast.

We were glad to be supported by Emily Warren and the team from Lime, one of the biggest companies in the U.S. providing shared bikes and scooters, to kick things off with a look at some of the hot button issues like fleet size, requirements for locking technology, and how to proactively ensure that their services are available to everyone in a community.

Broken up into small groups, Collaborative members chose two policy topics they wanted to develop, like equipment and safety, operations, data standards, and equity, to name just a few. Over the space of half a day, Collaborative members explored the core components of a comprehensive policy and identified key policy areas to consider, set a recommended policy floor (a fundamental basic level of policy that all cities can and should adopt), and highlighted a few options for differing levels of action in each policy area.

The exercise illustrated the power of cities coming together to solve problems, learn what’s working (or not working), and learn from each other. This is the true strength of the Collaborative and the reason we’ve continued this work for nearly two years now.

With the help of our colleagues at Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition, we closed out the three-day meeting with a look at each city’s equity guiding policy and examined how they translate those policies into action in their projects.

Each participant shared their department’s or agency’s equity policy—or their lack of one—what that policy meant to them and how they’ve tangibly incorporated it into their projects. Participants worked to identify gaps and areas for improvement as they move forward with their projects to ensure equity and access for everyone. It was a refreshing discussion that illuminated the ongoing difficulty in applying ambitious principles to policies and then to actual projects on the ground.

Participants getting a tour of some of the experiments going on in downtown Pittsburgh, including a painted bus lane through the incredibly busy corridor, parklets along the curb lane, artistic interventions, and a raised bus bump-out to make bus boarding easier.

The Collaborative reconvenes this December in Atlanta, just before Transportation for America’s Capital Ideas conference, which will also tackle this issue of new mobility. At Capital Ideas (open for registration now!), we will be focusing on the states’ role and how they can lead the way while also working in partnership with the providers and cities to create a transportation system that works for everyone.

Join us in Atlanta for Capital Ideas this December! Psst, find out what’s on the agenda here.

Focusing on the positives of dockless bikes and scooters

Cities are quickly passing policies to manage the influx of dockless bike share and scooters in their communities. How can they craft policies to achieve the outcomes they want, rather than simply avoiding the ones they don’t?

We’re more than halfway through 2018 and shared active transportation services such as dockless bike share and stand up electric scooters continue to expand, often without warning, to new cities across the country. As a result, cities are beginning to pass policies and regulations to manage the demands and challenges these new services create.

But, instead of shaping these services in a way that maximizes their positive impacts, so far, their policies seem to be more focused on simply preventing potential negative outcomes. In order to unlock the full benefits of these vehicles, they’ll need to craft policies that address both.

One of the starkest examples of this is how cities are allocating space for these vehicles, both when they’re in use and not. To prevent dockless scooters and bikes from blocking sidewalks and creating chaos in the right-of-way, Denver, for example, has passed requirements for operators to install and maintain painted parking zones throughout the city.

Creating parking spaces is a great way to ensure these vehicles aren’t making city streets less safe when they’re not in motion. But, this should be paired with efforts to create a safer environment for these vehicles and their users when they are in motion. In order to foster the adoption of these services and truly make their streets safer, cities should clearly articulate where these vehicles should operate and carve out protected spaces for people to ride.

The need for protected infrastructure has been apparent for years with bicyclists and pedestrians and is quickly becoming clear with scooters as well. Last month, Jenasia Summers, a 21-year-old woman in Cleveland, was struck and killed by a car while riding a scooter in a six-lane road with no dedicated space for active transportation users. Stories like this are far too common and are directly related to the low rates of active transportation users—half of Americans would like to ride bicycles more, but are afraid of interactions with motor vehicles.

To help create additional space and infrastructure for active transportation users, cities could use the fees they receive from private mobility providers to build out new bike and pedestrian infrastructure that will foster the adoption of these services.

But, even as scooter companies such as Bird are offering to give cities $1 per vehicle per day for cities to use for better bike infrastructure and safety measures, cities aren’t actually codifying this in policy.

A city’s budget reflects its priorities. If cities are truly committed to increasing active transportation, they should include provisions to directly allocate revenue from these services toward providing better infrastructure as these vehicles increase in popularity. Even if the total amount of money isn’t much, it’s an opportunity for cities to carve out space for their stated priorities.

A greater focus on the positive impacts of new mobility options can go beyond safety. In its updated Free Floating Bike Share Permit Requirements, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) has incentivized providers to offer adaptive cycles as part of their fleets. Adaptive cycles include a range of two- or three-wheeled vehicles, such as tricycles, hand-pedaled cycles or recumbent cycles where the rider leans back in their seat, that can be used by individuals who are unable to operate a two-wheeled bicycle. To put more of these on the road, SDOT will allow operators to expand their fleets if they provide a certain share of adaptive cycles.

Additionally, SDOT has specified in their policy that they will allocate $50,000 from permitting fees toward developing and leveraging community partnerships to increase adaptive cycling ridership and access. While it still needs to clarify some of the specifics of how these partnerships will work, SDOT has clearly outlined its priorities to increase access by providing incentives to private mobility providers and has allocated additional resources to engage people with disabilities to increase ridership.

It’s very early in the process of determining how to regulate these new shared active transportation services and there’s still much to learn about how best to utilize these new mobility options in service of our long-term outcomes. But, as cities integrate them into their communities and are generating revenue from their operations, there’s an excellent opportunity to chart a new course and develop regulations in way that truly advances their long-term positive outcomes, rather than simply trying to prevent their negative impacts.

At our next Smart Cities Collaborative meeting in Pittsburgh, we’ll discuss these challenges and explore policy provisions for shared active transportation services that maximize their benefits. Stay tuned for an update on what we learn, what the biggest challenges are, and what a model policy could look like.

Smart Cities Collaborative hits the ground running in year two

Returning in a bigger fashion than the first year with 23 cities instead of 16, our Smart Cities Collaborative picked up where we left off with the launch of year two last week in Denver, CO.

It’s only been a few short months since we wrapped up the first year of the Collaborative, but we’ve still seen significant developments in how new and emerging technologies are reshaping the right-of-way and curb space. One instructive example is what’s currently happening in cities with dockless bike- and scooter-sharing systems—and how fast it’s happening.

When our first cohort of 16 cities gathered in Minneapolis on the day after the presidential election in 2016, there wasn’t a single dockless bikesharing system operating in any of these 16 cities. As pilot projects launched in Seattle, Washington, DC, and others in 2017, it became clear that dockless would have huge impacts in the year to come.

Nine months later and dockless is certainly a growing fixture in scores of cities. This might have been an obvious prediction, but even we didn’t quite see the scooters coming so fast. Less than 18 months after that first Collaborative meeting, dozens of cities are now scrambling to develop new approaches to dockless scooters (as well as the bikes) that are rapidly expanding on their streets and fighting for scarce curb and sidewalk space, but also providing popular new mobility options for getting around our congested cities.

In 2016, Uber (and Google’s Waymo) were just dipping their toes in the water on testing automated vehicles (AVs). Lured to Arizona by a friendly (i.e., mostly just non-existent) regulatory environment, they both started testing AVs in mid to late 2016 with relatively small fleets of cars, which have quickly grown to hundreds on the road in Arizona (and elsewhere). But now, cities (and states and Congress) are determining how they should proceed in the wake of the first fatal AV crash in Tempe, AZ.

This is the pace of change that cities are dealing with when it comes to urban mobility and technology: Completely new mobility models from concept to widespread rollout in less than 18 months.

Standing still or just waiting to see how things develop simply isn’t a viable strategy for cities that want to harness this change for the benefit of their cities and their residents. They have to be proactive.

That’s why over 60 participants from 43 agencies representing 23 cities came to Denver last week for the kickoff meeting of the Collaborative’s second cohort.

Though this new cohort brought scores of new faces to the Collaborative (thirteen cities from last year returned), the spirit of collaboration and cooperation carried over in full. From the moment participants arrived from the airport in to Denver’s Union Station, they quickly and easily engaged with one another about the challenges they’re facing in their cities, the projects they’re working on, and started getting to know each other.

Similar to our first kickoff meeting in Minneapolis last year, the goal of this meeting was to get participants to know one another, identify the challenges they’re trying to solve, and develop tangible action plans for the year — not just to set goals, but also to identify areas for collaboration with other cities.

We were incredibly lucky to have Denver Mayor Michael B. Hancock stop by to welcome everyone to the city, and also ground us with a reminder that the core purpose of this work is to make our cities better places to live for everyone — not just for a privileged few.

“This is much broader than just ‘what does the road look like,’” Mayor Hancock said. “It’s also an opportunity for us to lean in and lead with our values and be inclusive. And making sure that those people who are most challenged in our communities have an opportunity to raise themselves up by lifting those burdens of the cost of housing and transportation off of their shoulders,” he concluded.

Unlike last year, where some cities were still figuring out their projects during our kickoff meeting, many of the participants arrived in Denver with a much clearer idea of what they plan to work on over the course of this year.

But instead of diving straight into the details of these projects, we took a step back to get participants on the same page for talking and thinking about these projects, and to make sure their projects had a clearly identified problem and outcome in mind. That’s why we’re perpetually asking, “What problem are you trying to solve?” because we all too often rush straight to the solution or a specific piece of technology.

Throughout the first day, the experts and panel discussions and conversations focused on the bigger picture of where technology is going, what trends are real (or not real), and why collaboration is vital for having any chance to stay ahead of the curve. Participants also identified the long-term vision for their city and, reflecting Mayor Hancock’s comments above, discussed strategies for improving equity through their projects, and hard-coding that goal into all of their processes.

Having set the tone in day one, teams from each of the cities spent the bulk of the second day developing their action plans for the coming year. But in keeping with the modus operandi of the Collaborative, they started hashing out their action plans in a cooperative format with 10-12 people from other cities who are working on a similar specific issue, such as a dynamic curb management pilot project.

This helps connect them directly with their peers who are working on similar issues and see where opportunities for greater collaboration exist. And it’s hard to overstate how valuable these structured (and unstructured) opportunities are for connecting with peers facing similar challenges in other cities.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. If one particular city has made progress in rolling out a new strategy to better manage curb space, or a new pilot program for flexible delivery zones, for example, other cities can and should replicate their successes and learn how to avoid the pitfalls others encountered along the way.

They only had a few hours to develop them, but the cities’ action plan presentations were sharp, focused, and calibrated to tackle their real problems with real outcomes in mind over the next year. Presentations covered a wide range of topics: permitting processes for dockless bikeshare and scooters, loading zone pilots for ridesourcing and delivery vehicles, first-mile/last-mile microtransit pilots, new performance metrics to assess “transportation happiness,” and much more.

Like last year, this year’s cohort has an enthusiasm and excitement to collaborate with one another and collectively shape the future of transportation. It was a busy two days, but participants stuck around at the end of the meeting to weigh in on their projects with one another, ask questions, and exchange information for future conversations.

Representing metro areas that are collectively home to almost a full third of the US population (and a huge chunk of Canada via the inclusion of Toronto), the decisions these leaders are making will affect how we think and talk about transportation for years down the road. After this first two-day stretch with this new group of 60+ leaders, we’re confident that they are headed in the right direction when it comes to navigating the rapid changes coming to urban transportation.

We’re looking forward to being part of this conversation and to our next in-person meeting of the Collaborative this July in Seattle.

This post was written by Transportation for America’s Rob Benner and Steve Davis.

Looking into the crystal ball on shared-use mobility at a three-day conference

The Shared-Use Mobility Center and the North American Bike Share Association are hosting a three-day conference September 28th-30th in Chicago focusing on the crossroads of technology and the emerging use of shared mobility services like bikeshare systems, car share networks and ride-hailing apps, and we’ve got a special promotional rate for T4America supporters interested in attending.

move-together

The Move Together: Shared-Use Mobility Summit will host talks and workshops by transportation professionals who work at city and state DOTs, non-profits and mobility companies like Lyft and Ridescout, among others. On tap to be discussed is a wide range of topics on shared-use mobility with practical applications, including how to integrate these new mobility options with transit, how shared mobility can help the disadvantaged, local and federal policy issues that affect shared-use mobility and autonomous vehicles, and how these new forms of transportation will affect cities and suburbs.

Also, don’t miss T4America director James Corless speaking on the “Federal Policy and Funding for Shared Mobility” panel. There’s still time to register for the conference and receive a 10 percent discount using the SUMCT4AMERICA promo code.

As giant companies like Google ramp up research on and investment in autonomous vehicles, ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft redefine what it means to be a part-time or contracted worker, and bikeshare networks proliferate across the country in cities big and small, cities and states are scrambling to figure out how to accommodate these untraditional modes of transportation. Shared-use mobility can provide access to transportation for areas often underserved by transit, as well as enable greater mobility in and around cities.

The public is embracing these modes of transport, often quicker than cities and towns can adapt. The National Shared-Use Mobility Summit is primed to offer some insight for both public officials and industry professionals on how to work together and what’s coming next.

Register today to with promo code SUMCT4AMERICA to save 10 percent on the ticket fee and get the inside scoop on the future of transportation.