TLDR: I rode around all of the city to all 25 bike share docks and only found four working bikes.

If you read any of my stuff, you know that I am a pretty big bike advocate and love exploring Baltimore. So there are probably a short list of people who are rooting for Baltimore Bike Share more than I am. I have been to Portland, New York City, and DC and seen bike shares that are all over the city and widely used (I have also been to Boise, which has a much, much more modest bike share).

Baltimore is on the verge of being a first class, 21st century city that attracts the millennials that will start increasing the tax base, and turning around the population decline. But one of the things that needs to happen to compete with cities like New York, DC, Pittsburgh, Philly, or even west coast cities like San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle is a working bike share (and mass transit) system. We have an image problem with the crime that regularly plagues many of our neighborhoods, but even our nicer areas sometimes don’t feel like they compete with other comparable cities.

Thats why the trajectory of our bike share program is particularly troubling. It was launched last October so that kinks could be shaken out of the system. The plan was for the second wave of docks to be rolled out by May, in time for Bike to Work Day in mid May. We are now in September, which is the month that the docks are supposed to be installed, but color me skeptical.

I walk through the Inner Harbor to Camden Yards every day on my way to work, so I have slowly seen the National Aquarium and Camden Yards bike stock dwindle over the months.

And this is not a new problem. I have only relied on Bike Share a handful of times, but it has failed me in two major ways already. The first was outlined in a previous version of Baltimore Around the World, and the second was when a friend and I were going to do Bike Party and the whole system was down. Just like a bus system that doesn’t work all the time, a bike share that isn’t reliable means that you need an alternative that is reliable. And that means that Bike Share is not an equal part of our transportation system.

The real problem is that Bike Share’s communication has been comically bad. There was not a single notification on Bike Share’s website, Twitter or Facebook on the evening of Bike Party when the system was down (and the phone number just went to hold music for over 10 minutes). I have reached out to them over Facebook or email a few times since then, and the excuses have ranged from communication issues with the stations, to the lack of bikes being a ‘rebalancing’ issues.

A ‘rebalancing issue’ indicates that there are a glut of bikes at a handful of stations. So on Labor Day morning, I decided to go out and see exactly how many bikes there were in the city.

Spoiler: it was four. Four bikes in the whole city. If you want a bike share bike in Baltimore, you have a 22/25 chance of finding a dock with no bikes (unless all of those bikes end up at the same dock!). If you have a group of five people who want to go somewhere, you can travel the 20 miles I traveled to search every bike dock and not find enough bikes for your group. I don’t know how many ways I can put it: there are four bikes. Four.

Oh… I know. One of those bikes could not be checked out from the app because it was in maintenance. I didn’t bring my fob, so maybe that one was usable. But maybe there are actually only three usable bikes in the city.

So Lets Go Through The Stations

I went around all 25 stations. A couple notes:

I did this at 9:30 am on Labor Day. It took about two hours to get around to all of the stations, so its possible that some bikes were checked out and in use during my spot check.

The system reported 45 bikes in the dock at this time

Patterson Park

Reports 15 docks 1 bike. But you will notice from the photo that there are only 13 docks (including the used one)! I used the app to check this bike out and it successfully checked out, but I didn’t verify that it worked.

Docks: 15 reported; 13 present

Bikes: 1 reported; 1 present (0 electric)

Payment kiosk was operational