When people go to Downtown Boise today, it would be surprising if they didn’t see an electric scooter on the street. The nine-month-old e-scooter boom, however, has cut ridership on the Boise GreenBike system.
Scooters far outnumber the GreenBikes. There are three electric scooter companies — Lime, Bird and Spin — with 750 scooters serving Boise. There are only 127 GreenBikes.
Boise GreenBIkes had its best fiscal year ever in 2018 with a 50 percent increase in rides. But that year ended last Sept. 30, less than three weeks before the first e-scooters started showing up around town. Last month, Boise GreenBike started seeing the effects of the changed micro-mobility market.
In June, when the weather is nice, GreenBike ridership usually spikes. Not this year. Riders took 3,268 GreenBike trips, compared with 4,964 in June 2018 — a 34 percent drop.
GreenBike Director Dave Fotsch said scooters are to blame. That raises the question: Have the GreenBikes’ time passed?
Fotsch doesn’t think so. Despite the drop, Fotsch said he is confident there is a need for the GreenBike system in Boise. But he’s working on a plan that could make it easier to use.
“Not everyone wants to ride a scooter,” he said in an email. “The devices do have a pretty spotty safety record. People, especially middle-aged and above, are more comfortable on bikes. Our bikes have baskets, making it easier to carry a purse, a briefcase, lunch or some other parcel.”
Fotsch thinks some people use the bikes for different reasons than e-scooter users do. The average e-scooter ride is about a mile or less, he said. In June, the average GreenBike rider rode just under 4 miles.
A pay-as-you-go GreenBike rider pays $5 per hour with a $2 out-of-hub fee. A Lime rider pays $0.31 per minute plus a $1 unlock fee.
While ridership may have dropped, the service isn’t hurt financially, Fotsch said, because most GreenBike revenue comes from sponsorships and local support. In fiscal 2018, $205,807 of the GreenBike program’s $293,850 income came from sponsors.
Valley Regional Transit, which operates Boise GreenBike, issued a request for proposals Tuesday for a new partner to provide new bicycles, including at least some with electric motors, and to end the requirement that bikes be returned to docking stations.
Boise GreenBike now partners with Social Bicycles, a service by Jump Bikes that provides the hardware and software behind the bike-share system. The current system uses 2G and 3G networks. In April 2018, Uber acquired Jump. Jump won’t support the outdated GreenBike technology after November 2020. The contract with Social Bicycles ends in July 2020.
Depending on what happens with the requests for proposals, Boise could see a new bike-sharing system come spring.
Fotsch said it would be easier to scan a QR code to use a scooter than to enter a seven-digit number on a keypad to unlock the bikes, as is now required.
“Bike share is just one type of micro-mobility available in the marketplace,” the request for proposals reads. “The ease of unlocking the devices and the fact that users don’t have to work to get around made the scooters wildly popular, particularly for trips of one mile or less.”
The request for proposals lists several desirable characteristics that ValleyRide hopes the system will have, including a total of 500 bikes — four times as many as Boise GreenBike operates now — and other mobility devices, plus an equity program to make the bikes more affordable for low-income residents. ValleyRide also hopes the new system will continue using the existing stations.
Keeping the stations “would do the same thing that it does now in providing predictability for the customers and some order to where these bikes are left,” Fotsch said.
The proposals are due Aug. 13, and a decision is scheduled to be made Sept. 23 to allow the partner company to prepare to launch the new system in spring 2020.
This story was originally published July 03, 2019 4:49 PM.