The secret is ArborBike, the Clean Energy Coalition’s rent-by-the-hour system that wrapped up its first full season in December. Members, who sign up online or at one of thirteen docking stations, paid $6 a day, $10 a month, or $65 a year for unlimited sixty-minute rides on 125 custom-made, three-speed bikes. According to operations manager Heather Croteau, one of the most popular trips was from the corner of Murfin and Hubbard on North Campus to Murfin and Bonisteel. Members “tend to ride down the Murfin [Ave.] hill,” she emails, “but rarely ride up it.”
The students presumably walked back up the hill. The bikes rode back in a truck.
That was just one of the surprises in ArborBike’s first season. From March to December, it clocked 13,800 trips, and closed the year with 4,800 unique riders. That’s fewer than half the 10,000 members the group predicted in a September 2014 Ann Arbor News article.
CEC also expected a higher trip volume. “But after talking to other systems this year, there’s a statistic they use: 80 percent of your revenue will come from day passes, and 80 percent of your trips will come from annual and monthly [passes],” Croteau says. A typical day pass user will “maybe make one trip from one station to another, whereas we see the annual and monthly passes riding several times a day, every day.”
About three-quarters of ArborBike’s memberships sold were day passes, compared to 562 monthly and just eighty-two annual passes. Fortunately, it isn’t depending on rider revenue to survive: CEC landed a $600,000 federal grant, as well as city and U-M funding, to launch the system, and the university pledged $200,000 a year for three years to operate it.
It seems likely that students and U-M staff accounted for a large share of ArborBike usage. Croteau says only 6 percent of this season’s riders registered using “@umich.edu” email addresses, but they took 40 percent of all trips. By far the busiest of station was at South University and East University, which also saw the most round-trip rides. Stations at South University and State and at the Central Campus Recreation Building on Washtenaw were also among the most popular.
Off-campus stations saw notably less traffic. A temporary station at South Division and Hill saw the least use, partly due to flooding that caused it to malfunction several times (members use credit or debit cards to release the bikes). That station will move to its originally intended spot outside the Intramural Sports Building on Hoover after construction there is complete in early 2016. The ArborBike station outside City Hall was the second-least used.
Despite disappointing ridership, CEC representatives say they consider ArborBike’s first full season a success. But sales of “sponsorships”–ads that may be placed either on a docking station or on a bicycle itself–were definitely underwhelming. CEC director of business operations Cassandra Fletcher-Martin says the main challenge now is finding funding to “grow the system in a way that’s meaningful for the community and economically feasible.” That could include more federal grants, foundation money, or sponsorships from businesses that want to subsidize a nearby ArborBike station.
CEC is still working through the right-of-way permitting process for a planned station at South University and Washtenaw. Originally planned for a 2015 rollout, it is the only ArborBike location in a state right-of-way. Otherwise, no new stations are currently planned for 2016.
That will disappoint the system’s small but enthusiastic user base, who’d like to see stations much farther flung around town. “People are requesting them out at the grocery stores–Plum Market, Kroger,” Croteau says. “They’re requesting them out on Plymouth or out at Briarwood.”
