Seattle councilmembers voted to approve a $1.4 million payment to keep Pronto Cycle Share afloat. This means the city now fully owns the bike-share system.
They were divided in Monday afternoon’s meeting on whether to bail out the city’s bike-share system or walk away from the struggling program.
Some, like councilmember Lisa Herbold, were pushing for Seattle to cut the purse strings.
"When we talk about buying Pronto, we're talking about buying their debt," Herbold said.
Nicole Freedman, who oversees the bike share program for the Seattle Department of Transportation, said that Pronto Cycle Share was unable to pay its bills in December.
So SDOT shelled out $305,000 to keep it afloat, which makes a total of $1.7 million invested so far.
SDOT revealed that estimates for Pronto had expected about 446,000 bike trips a year, with revenue around $860,000. In reality, the program had about 140,000 bike trips a year, with revenue around $667,000.
Freedman said the estimates in the initial study were too high.
“They really just overshot, but it really performed the way it should have performed,” Freedman said.
She also said that there simply wasn’t enough capital to start with, but she feels the program will break even now that the city owns it.
Herbold and Burgess wanted to walk away from Pronto, using the $1.4 million to pay off Pronto’s $1 million federal loan -- which is the city’s responsibility -- instead.
That would have still allowed for the city to later invest in an improved bike share program.
That amendment failed.
Instead, three other amendments made it to the final bill, which includes a $50,000 study on how to make sure the bikes reach low-income and minority communities.
In early March, KIRO 7 reported that the city has suffered a loss from parking revenue due to the bicycle stations taking over those spaces.
According to SDOT, 15 of the 54 bike share stations take up 44 to 49 parking spaces, resulting in $140,000 to $170,000 in lost city revenue a year.
In the end, councilmember Mike O'Brien's amendment moved out of committee with a 4-2 vote.
It proposes the city save the bike share system and requires regular reporting from SDOT to the council as well as separate accounting for Pronto.
"I believe that this is part of our public transportation network," O'Brien said, "and just as we invest in other parts of transportation, I think a bike share system is worthy of an investment."
Seattle is now one of several cities across the U.S. that owns its bike share system.
Pronto had been using a company called Motivate as a third-party operator. Motivate is still running the operations for Seattle’s system, as well as programs across the country.
Dani Simons, a Motivate spokesperson, said “Motivate works in a number of different cities with a number of different highly successful operating models, ranging from the most prevalent model -- fully publicly funded (e.g. Capital Bikeshare in D.C.), to public-private partnerships such as the soon to launch BIKETOWN system in Portland, OR. And we run two privately-run systems in New York and the Bay Area. We are proud of our ability to help cities maximize their resources to deliver robust bike share programs that serve a wide audience.”
The Bay Area bike share started out as a publicly funded system that has now become privately owned.