CaBi stations on the National Mall, demand > supply (need more stations/docks)

Some further overflow thoughts:

There are those who might be swayed by the “more dock-capacity needed” argument, but who may insist that six stations on the National Mall is sufficient. (Six stations from Lincoln steps to the pool in front of the Capitol), and I can well imagine some even pro-cycling people and pro-CaBi people might even say more would be a nuisance. I can see the merit of this argument, but to them I say/ask three things:

(1) How are tourists finding CaBi stations? If they don’t enter the Mall at the Lincoln Memorial, they only have four on the entire way down to the Capitol, and some of these can be easy to miss.

(2) For whatever the merits of the argument to limiting station density on the Mall, the lack of station density probably creates the same problem as the lack of bicyclist density in general. I refer to the bicycling safety in numbers theory by which more bikes apparently leads to fewer overall accidents/injuries/deaths (and therefore far fewer per-capita accidents), partly because bicycling crosses a threshold into becoming normalized. In short: More density = more acceptance. The principle applies to CaBi station density, too, I think, in this case, and in the special case of the National Mall. More people seeing CaBi bikes and stations creates more acceptance and therefore is a win for bicycling. This is a separate benefit on top of the meeting the obvious supply-demand problem easily observable today.

(3) There is a new e-scooter parking zone pilot program which has some 19 designated parking zones. That’s far more parking zones, in the same space, than CaBi has (with its six stations). If 6 is enough to cover this big space, why did they go for 19?

In a recent thread, LhasaCM mentioned that the National Parks Service (which “runs” the National Mall) is right now running a pilot program involving 19 scooter parking zones on the Mall, after for a long time struggling with what to do about e-scooters since their big rise starting about 2018. Nineteen scooter parking zones on the same stretch of ground on which CaBi has six stations (the two flanking Lincoln and just four more on the two miles to the Capitol). This approval of nineteen e-scooter drop-off zones seems to me a clear tacit acknowledgment that six “stations” is far too few to serve the market’s needs.

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Some might also say signs (“This way to Capital Bikeshare”) might help to direct people and be a work-around to some of these problems, potentially bypassing a need for more stations as such (if more dock-capacity is added, because demand crushes supply right now.)

Are there CaBi signs on the Mall now? Not AFAIK, except the ones on physical maps. The practical problem is also getting any kind of sign approved. This subject came up in another recent thread:

@Judd 210556 wrote:

Putting up signs on NPS property typically requires going through a compliance process to assess the impact on the things that NPS is charged with preserving including viewsheds. There’s understandably a reluctance to do a ton of work to install a single sign.

Judd is right. I don’t know that signs will ever be approved. The same problem is also the reason ofc why new stations would not be approved (but then there is much less reluctance to designate spaces to dump e-scooters).

Over the past few years, I’ve observed National Mall visitors on bike-/ebike-/escooter-share a lot. How do tourists connect with them? I think it happens like this (my impression):

The most common way is tourists come across stations/bikes/scooters by chance. For this ‘market,’ unplanned trips may be a more common entry-point than people seeking them out either by word-of-mouth, signs (if there are any), physical map (stations are there, albeit in tiny font, on the physical maps on Mall grounds), or the app map (and first-time-user tourists of course wouldn’t have the app at all yet; side issue: IMO the new app is less user-friendly than the pre-LYFT-era map).

There are of course some brand loyalists who seek out bikes/scooters via their Uber app, or BIRD app, or some other method. But I think the leading way the Mall gets bikeshare traffic (bike-, specifically, not scooter-share) is people just encountering stations and giving it a try.

If I’m right on this, signs could help, in principle, but the best solution is still more stations.