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| [I even made this fancy chart.] |
Yet if the goal of NiceRide was to get people to ride around downtown Saint Paul, last year has to be considered a failure.I did a rough survey of a representative sample of 10 stations from each of the downtowns, and the results are disheartening for Saint Paul bicycling. Of the ten stations in Saint Paul, only two locations came close to the 1,000 trip barrier. Most spots stayed well below 300 trips per season (or about two rentals per day per station). By contrast, even the worst performing Downtown Minneapolis station was almost at 2,000 trips, with the most popular (the IDS Center) exceeding 10,000 trips during the bicycling season. The total trips at the 10 Minneapolis locations was 46,379, while Saint Paul’s locations equaled just 5,594, a tiny fraction of the city to the West.[...]Saint Paul has good intentions and fine goals. The city has a new bicycle coordinator (who writes for this very website), and has been working on a bicycle plan for some time. But without bike lanes in downtown Saint Paul, those eye-catching green bikes are are for urban bicycling what those Snoopy statues are for street life. They’re strictly symbolic. Maybe this year will prove me wrong, but I’m afraid that until Saint Paul has contiguous and comfortable bike lanes downtown, Nice Ride will remain a underused symbol of good intentions and lack of action.
Saint Paul is way behind Minneapolis on bikes. It's been lapped and lapped again, and as a guy who rides back and forth between the two cities every day, it's frustrating. (If Minneapolis didn't exist, would I think Saint Paul was the bees knees?) The Nice Ride disparity really throws that gap into stark relief. We need a bike plan and some downtown bike lanes pronto. We can't keep trumpeting our nice Ride program if we're averaging only one person at each station each day.
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