Five months ago, I did a ride around the city to find out exactly how many bikes there were in the system. Despite the app reporting 45 bikes, and the Baltimore Bikeshare (BBS) social media accounts saying that everything was fine, I found three working bikes, and one inoperable bike.

I posted my writeup on September 11 after trying (and failing) to get some kind of official comment from anyone related to BBS. The next day, they announced that the system would be shutting down for a month so they could do a reset, refurbish the bikes, and install better locks.

I still have no idea if my little blog post had anything to do with the timing. It seems unlikely, but the lack of official statements made me an unofficial spokesperson for Bikeshare for the Baltimore Sun and WJZ. That’s right. A post where one of my main points was that Bike Share’s communication was terrible made me a spokesperson because BBS wasn’t even communicating with the media!

BBS said that they would roll back out after a month, and that many of the issues that have plagued the system should be fixed. They also said they were hiring Chris King who would handle the communications. They sent an email acknowledging the issue and offering extended memberships, sent another email a week later, and then one at launch pointing to their users as their biggest ambassadors. It was a good start to regular communication, but it did lack a bit of substance.

But lets not get hung up on communication when we have a bike share rollout happening! One of the big points of my last post was that there were no bikes available, and that has completely changed. Since a location has opened near my house, I have been able to use bike share 27 times in a month. And its been wildly reliable!

There was only a single time that I was not able to get a bike at my first choice dock

When I have reported issues with a bikes, they were taken out of circulation quickly, and replaced with a working bikes

It has become a rarity to find a bike that has a mechanical issue because they are much more on top of the issues

Docks are being rolled back out at a very reasonable rate (I even saw Little Italy being installed!)

E-bikes used to be scarce, but its now almost harder to find a non e-bike!

You might not be able to see it because I had to fit all EIGHT bikes in the frame, but every single one of these are e-bikes. All… eight.

With the product finally becoming a useful part of the transportation mix in the city, lets look at the part that is still failing: the communication.

Here is the thing: people get annoyed when they expect something and it does not come to fruition. If you are driving somewhere, and Google Maps tells you there will be 20 minutes of extra traffic, you are less annoyed because you were (hopefully) able to leave earlier and expected it. If you hear that there is a great new food place, but also hear that there is always a long line, you can make that part of your decision to go. If you are asked to attend a meeting at work and are told it will be 6 hours long, you can mentally prepare, bring a snack, and tell people not to expect you in the office.

Expectations are a huge part of dealing with life when things are unpredictable.

That’s why we get annoyed with people who are flaky, or serial exaggerators. Don’t promise me you can get something done that is outside your wheelhouse. Don’t tell me that you have the biggest, best or flashiest widget when you do not. Being wrong occasionally is fine, but being wrong constantly is bad.

BBS’s communications people consistently oversell, borderline make things up, or just ignore. It was a problem in the year before the relaunch, and its been just as bad since the relaunch. Lets look at the timeline since the relaunch.

October 15: Nine initial docks reopened with 50 bikes, including The Can Company, Bond St Warf, Harbor Point, Harbor East, McHenry Row, UM Biopark, the Visitors Center, Center Plaza, and National Aquarium. There was nothing on the BBS Twitter or Facebook, and nothing emailed out, but there was a Baltimore Sun article from October 12 that said they didn’t know what docks would open or how many bikes they would have despite claiming otherwise.

October 30: Cross St Market opens. Despite only one more dock in the three weeks since claiming they had a purposeful plan (that they didn’t elaborate on), they started calling their shots with confidence. Not only were they going to get the other 15 existing docks reopened, but they claimed that they were going to open new stations (plural). Definitely.

Not everyone was convinced.

November 10: After promising five reopened stations by the 10th, they delivered. City Hall, Pratt & Light, Patterson Park, Camden Yards, and Pratt & Howard all opened on time. They announced the openings the afternoon before, which is fine if that’s as soon as they were confident.

November 12: Mount Vernon Marketplace reopens.

November 16: Broadway and Monument, by Hopkins Metro, reopens

November 29: Shot Tower reopens

At this point, they have opened 18 out of the 25 original stations. They are a little behind on that original call that would ‘definitely’ happen, but they finally update the timeline. On November 29, they report that all pre-shutdown stations will reopen by December 2.

Here is how that promise fared:

Union Square: December 1

Hotel Indigo: December 13

Lexington Market: December 13

University of Maryland: Around December 15

They also opened Hollins Square, Cathedral/Eager, and Hopkins place. They didn’t announce their opening on Facebook or Twitter, and I have not kept a log of when they opened, but I believe they opened sometime during the week of December 4–8.

Not great. Missed deadlines, and no updates. Not only that, but on December 12, before three of the original stations were even opened, they announced nine more stations by the end of the month.

They finally got all of the original stations reopened by December 15, and then announced the nine stations again, but this time said they would be installed by two days later.

On the heels of a slew of missed deadlines, they give themselves one of the most ambitious deadlines yet. Not only that, but between the two announcements, they gave two different lists. One list had Perkins Homes, and the other had Eastern/Linwood.

Do I need to tell you how this deadline went? Lets use the list they were more successful on.

When asked about North and Maryland on January 20th, they responded:

You can’t make this stuff up.

The worst one on that list was St Paul and Madison, which they actually announced as being open on December 23. For some reason, it was not ready and was not actually opened. There are a few options for dealing with this. 1) Admit you messed up in a follow up tweet, 2) Ignore the issue and wait for people to figure it out, or 3) delete the tweet and pretend it didn’t happen.

THEY CHOSE OPTION 3. The only evidence left are two tweets from someone who went to the dock, only to find it closed.

They never responded. They waited a week and then deleted the original tweet.

Even though they promised Varsity on Biddle, and North/Maryland (and Perkins Homes if you consider both lists they put out), they have opened two other docks since then: Gough/Wolfe and O’Donnell Square.

There is no better way to summarize the issues than with the tweet of someone who walked to a station that was supposed to be open:

What are you expecting then?

I am not saying to never be wrong. It happens. But the level of communication over the last year and a half has been terrible, and has only barely improved since the relaunch. Here is my suggestion:

Give updates on how things are going. People who follow you on Twitter or Facebook care about those kinds of details, or they wouldn’t follow you.

When things change, say that. For example, I have gleaned from various sources that the Penn Station dock is having issues being approved because of Amtrak. But very little of that information has come from BBS. “The Penn Station dock is waiting for X approval. We are hoping to get it in the next few months, but it could be stopped by Y”. That’s a reasonable update. Expectations adjusted.

If there are issues in the system, its ok to admit that. Before the reboot, it did not help at all to whitewash the truth and pretend like things were fine. It also doesn’t help to delete tweets when they are wrong.

Basically, be transparent!

It does not need to be this hard. There is a vibrant bike community in Baltimore that is rabid about first class cycling. Bikemore is the unofficial point group, but there are also less structured groups like Bike Party or Adam Aviv’s Southeast rides. If BBS said “we need some ambassadors”, they would probably have more people than they knew what to do with.

If we want BBS to be successful enough to grow past 500 bikes and 50 docks, things like this need to be fixed. People need to be able to rely on BBS. This can’t be just another thing that people derisively say “well, Baltimore just can’t have nice things.”

Unless we just get on the dockless bandwagon and bypass this whole problem.