The death and rebirth of bikesharing in Seattle: Implications for policy and system design

What factors determine the ridership of micro-mobility systems such as bikesharing or scooter sharing? This paper presents a case study on bikesharing in Seattle, USA, which has the distinction of being both one of the few cities in the world where a modern public bikesharing system (named Pronto in Seattle) has been shut down, and the first US city to permit dockless bikesharing operations. These dockless services produced more bikesharing trips in four months than Pronto did in its entire two-and-a-half-year run, and in their first year 11 times more rides than Pronto had in its first year. The contrast in performance between these two systems provides a unique opportunity to test alternative theories for why Pronto’s ridership struggled where others have succeeded, offering more general insights into how system designers and regulators can avoid repeating the pitfalls of Seattle’s original bikesharing launch. This case study triangulates qualitatively between popular press reports, interviews with key stakeholders, an original survey of bikesharing users, and ridership data from multiple bikesharing systems to evaluate the contributions of eleven factors to Pronto’s low ridership. It concludes that the most important reasons for Pronto’s struggles were inadequate system scale, station density, geographic coverage area, ease of use, and pricing structure. Critically, these factors all represent explicit choices made by system designers and policymakers, rather than local market or environmental factors beyond their control. The higher ridership of dockless bikesharing in Seattle appears primarily due to differences in these factors, which are not necessarily exclusive to dockless services. The paper closes with a discussion of how policymakers can avoid condemning emerging micro-mobility services to Pronto’s fate of low ridership.