Should A Bike-Share Ride Cost The Same As The Bus?

The last time I thought about riding bike-share, I was on my way to a press conference in downtown Seattle and missed the bus. I happened to be a few blocks away from a Pronto station and considered just hopping on a bike rather than waiting 10 minutes for the next bus. But the idea of paying $8 for a 24-hour pass (the least expensive option for riding Pronto) kept me waiting. It just didn’t seem worth paying more than triple the price of a bus ride for the 20 minutes of pedaling I needed.

I am an infrequent bike-share user. For one, there are no Pronto stations in my neighborhood in Seattle. But even when I lived in the system’s service area, I rarely chose bike-share over riding my personal bicycle. As such, I have no need to purchase an annual membership. But if there were an option to use bike-share the way I use transit — paying $2.50 to $3 for a single ride from point A to B — I would use it far more often.

For all the talk of bike-share being another form of public transit, the pricing structure of most major systems is nothing like bus or rail. In Seattle there’s the 24-hour option, which grants the rider as many zero to 30 minutAdobe Connect Central Logine-rides for free for a whole day. There’s a similar $16 three-day pass. Then there’s an $85 annual pass for frequent users. Boston, New York, Chicago and many others offer similar options.

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