Find out Wednesday at 2 p.m. at Newton City Hall for a Hubway bikeshare information session. The meeting is organized by the Newton Bike Advisory Committee; Bill Paille, Director of Transportation for the City, and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.
How does Hubway work? Look at this…
This is such a no-brainer. Please add Hubway to Newton.
I cannot attend but am very interested in how this shapes up. This is probably not a no-brainer (we had a good discussion somewhere else on this blog about some of the plusses and minuses and thought about where bikes make sense), but I think some sort of bike-sharing- and connection with the Boston Hubway system, particularly for those of us near Brighton, makes sense. I’d use it.
I’m going to see if I can get away long enough to attend this.
I think a north-side implementation along the Washington St./watertown st. Corridor makes most sense initially, because of no big hills like comm ave or beacon street have. Any implementation requires a boston buildout into Brighton, either Oak Square or Cleveland Circle.
They are already at Brighton Landing – but yes, more connections in Brighton and Allston would make sense in the overall plan
I think Doug’s right on target. Hubway has been an outstanding service to date, but the business case has to be looked at very carefully. Actual commute traffic patterns need to support the service, otherwise we’ll end up with another Nexus shuttle bus system (for those of us who remember Nexus — well intentioned, not sustainable).
That said, I can think of two possible standalone candidates, not necessarily just Hubway but possible civic-minded sponsor(s). One would be a Newton Highlands/Needham Street connector, *after* a multi-use path is completed to get cyclists away from Needham Street motorist traffic. The other would be a Newton Centre/Mt. Ida College connector, again needing some bicycle lanes & signage to make the trek friendlier to more casual cyclists.
dulles, Hubway has made clear that they are very wary of leapfrogging past the existing network, rather preferring to build out from the existing network. Hopefully someday soon the locations you mentioned will be within striking distance. Or a non-Hubway stand-alone bikeshare could work until Hubway gets close enough.
Doug, I ride past/from Brighton Landing to Galen Street on my commute. There is a tough traffic maze to navigate at North Beacon/Nonantum Rd but bike lanes have great potential there. It would be close to the 30 min limit for many casual riders. A station in between, perhaps at the Canoe and Kayak facility next to the multi-path could be a good intermediate station location.
Nathan, was thinking the same thing. More stations in Allston/Brighton and a buildout west from there is what I guess Hubway would prefer. Emphasis on “guess.”
@Nathan, thanks. I think you and @Doug are correct the best bets for Hubway in Newton would be extensions from the city from Brighton or Watertown to Newton Corner or Nonantum. But the cycling infrastructure needs work to better support more casual Hubway cyclists. Galen Street (and adjacent Watertown Square), Washington Street, Nonantum’s tight roads and of course the “Circle of Death” aren’t accommodating to cyclists, to put it lightly.
I could see Mt. Ida or Wellesley College providing a campus bike service for their students, with one “unit” on campus at a second off-campus, located at each nearby train/subway station.
Washington Street Would be huge. We are unique designed for Hubway due to the various village centers.
Dulles, I stand corrected on the idea of satellite networks. Today at the Hubway meeting I learned that the SF Bay Area is launching a regional bike share program (http://bayareabikeshare.com/) that will incorporate regionally separated networks linked by transit. Hubway is watching to see how that works; if it does, one could imagine a mini-network around Needham St, for example, that connects via the Green Line to the Boston Hubway network, rather than the contiguous buildout I had mentioned earlier.
@nathan — awesome! Thanks for sharing.
A friend on Facebook did a very funny post today about “the anatomy of a bike share fail.” Basically, instead of taking the T home to Brighton from a Red Sox game at Fenway, he rents a bike. The bike is broken so he flails his way to the next Hubway station and exchanges bikes. When he gets to the Hubway station near his house it is full so he doubles back to the previous station which is also full. At the end of the night, he cannot find a free space so he takes it back to Kenmore and rides the T home. His FBFs told him about the Spotcycle App which uses GPS to locate nearby Hubway stations and availability of bikes and spaces.
The point is, one Hubway station is not enough. You need to have enough stations at convenient locations with available bikes and spaces to make it work.
@ted, what is supposed to happen is that Hubway balances those bikes out so there are usually spots. This doesn’t always work, especially at peak hours. I’ve been riding Hubway as a supplement to other forms of transit around Boston and Cambridge and don’t normally have a problem like that. But if you look at the Hubway system, the racks get thinner in number as you move to less dense neighborhoods.
People need to think multi-modal, and that’s a big shift in thought for many people. Recently I tried an experiment and drove to the parking lots on Soldier’s Field Road with my bike in the car, then biked into my office. I needed the car at the end of the day to get my daughter, but didn’t want to pay the high prices for parking in Cambridge. Plus, traffic getting out of Central Square can often add 30 minutes to a drive. By biking part-way I saved both time and money.
I tried a different experiment coming out of Logan one day by taking the Silver Line to South Station and then using Uber to get a cab. It didn’t save much money (maybe $10) and added an hour to the trip.
The point is, don’t just abandon a perfectly good mode of transit for another, but try to figure out how all the options fit into your life. He may have been better off using the Hubway to go to a different T station just so he could get a seat.
@Chuck, I totally agree with you. I was trying to use humor to illustrate my point, which is that putting a Hubway station in Newtonville, for example, without also having a number of others strategically located around Newton would probably not succeed.
Seems to me that for Hubway to really take off, they’ll have to start changing the balance of spots so that their availability is close to assured at all hours.
At the meeting, Jessica Robertson, transportation coordinator for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, said that the implementation that’s worked best is clustering stations, rather than distributing them evenly. So if you were to start with 6 stations, consider 2 clusters of 3 stations each. Cambridge took this approach and it’s worked well.