Capital Bikeshare Strives, Struggles to Meet High Demands in Region

By Shaun Courtney and Drew Hansen

As Capital Bikeshare grows and expands, the demand for bikes and spaces to park them increases, taxing and teaching the service each day.

“People weren’t really sure about how Bikeshare was going to work,” and now “we have nearly 5 million rides since we started,” Eric Gilliland, Capital Bikeshare’s director of operations, told The Washington Post. 

The system now has docks in Alexandria, Arlington County and the District and will soon expand to Montgomery County in Maryland. So far in 2013, subscribers have taken nearly a million rides with casual non-member users taking about 200,000, according to the Post.

But often during peak hours at popular stations, you either can't get a bike or can't find a dock to return one to. 

When the system first launched there was just one van moving bikes to redistribute them from full to empty stations, bringing bikes where they were needs or making space available to dock bikes where they were being returned. That van moved about 300 bikes each day, according to the Post.

Now with a million total rides recorded in just the first eight months of 2013, the system has six vans moving about 1,000 bikes daily, according to the Post. Rebalancing the system is a 20-hour-a-day job. 

Alexandria’s draft map for this year’s planned Capital Bikeshare expansion includes four stations in Del Ray, three stations in Carlyle and one station on Slaters Lane. 

“It’s hard, because we are stuck in traffic like everyone else,” Gilliland told the Post.

Based on data compiled by the Post from riderships in the fall of 2012, the station at Massachusetts Avenue NW and Dupont Circle is the most popular station out of all 190 in the system. The second most popular is the station at Columbia Circle at Union Station. Alexandria’s most popular station is at King Street Metro Station, according to the Post’s data.

Are there certain times of day when you don't bother trying to get a bike? Do you run into empty docks when you need a bike or full docks when you need to park a bike?