Although most counties, Montgomery among them, have been developing a network of bike routes that connect on-street bike lanes with off-road bike paths, the expansion of the Bikeshare program isn’t intended to encourage extended commutes from one county to the next.
“The vast majority of our commutes are under half an hour,” said Jim Sebastian, a Bikeshare manager who works for the District Department of Transportation.
If the funding is approved for the communities snug up against the District, it’s expected that some Bikeshare riders will commute to and from the city. But neither the bikes — built more like tanks than racing machines — nor the Bikeshare price structure make it sensible to pedal one of them in from Rockville.
“The bikes are stable and sturdy, but they’re not fast, so it’s not like someone would be able to do that,” Erenrich said.
Bikeshare membership costs $75 for a year, $25 for a month, $15 for three days and $7 for 24 hours. Long-term members get a key to unlock a bike from the docking station; short-term members get a five-digit code to do it. The first 30 minutes of riding are free, but fees kick in after that until the bike is returned to a docking station.
Because a Bikeshare membership is good throughout the region, planners expect that many Bikeshare riders will use a commuting combination that even includes two bike trips.
“What we’re trying to encourage people to do is called the ‘last mile,’ and it’s the idea that if you get off the Metro and you still have one mile to go to your house, you’ll use a bike,” John Lisle, spokesman for the District Department of Transportation, said. “We’re trying to get people out of their cars for those short trips.”
For the program to work in the new suburban areas, there needs to be interest in using the bikes locally in addition to enough community destinations to require several docking stations.
“You can’t really do it with one station,” Farthing said. “You have to have at least two so that people can go back and forth between them. I’ve heard about some advocates pushing for it in places like Reston, but Reston is difficult because you don’t have enough discrete places within a tight area that people will be going. So you put one in the Reston town center, where else?”
By contrast, Rockville is spread out sufficiently to support multiple stations — what Farthing calls “internal density.”
“You have to have a little bit of a demand either around a high residential area or a high employment area,” he said. “That’s why I think with Bethesda and Silver Spring — while there will be some movement in between them — a lot of the usage is going to be internal, with people who already work in Bethesda or work in Silver Spring and now are living in areas surrounding there.”
More local news:
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