While cars still dominate Honolulu streets, one can’t help but notice other modes of transportation making inroads around town. More people are walking, riding bicycles, or even skimming along on electric scooters or skateboards.
It’s a healthy evolution. As our urban centers grow more dense, as traffic grows unbearable and parking lots jam up, the goal of city planners should be to make our destinations as easy to reach without our cars as with one.
City officials have seeded this Complete Streets movement with public funds, installing bike lanes on roads and traffic-calming devices for pedestrian safety.
They also have supported companies providing alternative transportation through start-up investments. It’s a reasonable expense, but it should not an everlasting one. As these companies mature and grow, they will need to stand on their own, with business models that don’t require government support.
One of the most visible public investments is in Bikeshare Hawaii, a nonprofit company that operates those now-ubiquitous blue Biki bikes on city streets.
The city and state contributed $2 million that, along with private donations, Bikeshare Hawaii used to set up its network of short-term bicycle rentals in June 2017. Since then, the company has expanded rapidly — it now has 1,300 bikes and 130 docking stations — using city streets, sidewalks and more than 30 metered parking spaces for free.
“We’ve doubled our use per bike between year one and year two,” said Todd Boulanger, Bikeshare Hawaii’s executive director. “It used to be rare when we had 4,500 rides a day, but now it’s almost every day we have over that number.”
Last October, the company showed a 62% jump in rides from the same month the previous year. Riders took more than 1.3 million trips as of November.
But apparently popularity and a government-supported near-monopoly on the business aren’t enough. Increased demand also has increased operational costs, and Bikeshare Hawaii raised some of its fares to cover them (although low-income riders will get discounts). It will take about four more years just to break even, the company said.
City Councilmember Heidi Tsuneyoshi has introduced a measure urging the city administration to require Bikeshare Hawaii to sign a lease and pay for its use of city property — a reasonable point of discussion. It’s also worth noting that another bikeshare system, the for-profit RideSharee, operates primarily on private property, but has been targeted by the city for allowing its bicycles to be hired at bike racks on public sidewalks.
Meanwhile, the city has been pushing ahead with plans to relinquish 160 public parking spots — 80 on-street and 80 in municipal parking lots — to private car-share operators. Customers would be able to rent a car for short trips, the intended result being more trips with fewer cars on the road.
Car-share companies would reserve formerly public stalls at annual rates of $1,350; it’s $2,475 for downtown, and $4,380 for Waikiki.
There has been pushback. Critics of the car-share plan complained that the public is getting shortchanged on the rates. It’s a fair argument; the income aside, parking stalls that could serve multiple Oahu residents in the course of a day would now be occupied by a single for-profit vendor. Mayor Kirk Caldwell has said the city will look for places to dedicate new car-share stalls instead of using existing metered stalls.
For the moment, these businesses are in a nascent stage and provide only a fraction of what’s needed for a fully developed Complete Streets program. But they will grow and, we hope, prosper. As they do, they need to wean themselves from public support, so taxpayer funds can be freed up for other promising start-up investments as Complete Streets evolves and expands.
