Bikes will be here, there, but not yet everywhere

July 20, 2011|By Martine Powers, Globe Correspondent

As people signed up in Copley Square yesterday for Bostons bike-sharing… (JOHN TLUMACKI/GLOBE STAFF )

In Back Bay, there will be nine depots where bicyclists longing for a quick jaunt on a shiny set of wheels can rent a ride. In Jamaica Plain, there will be none.

In Allston, there will be eight bike-sharing stations. In South Boston? Zero.

As the countdown begins to next week’s inauguration of Boston’s bike-sharing initiative - evoking Paris and Washington, where bike sharing is all the rage - one of the most persistent questions from potential customers remains: Will Hubway, as it will be known, set up shop in my neighborhood?

Administrators in the city’s Boston Bikes program are finalizing the locations of about 60 stations, which will dispense 600 bikes. But since the company hired to run the program released a roster of tentative locations yesterday, potential Hubway users online and at public meet-and-greets have clamored to know why Hubway passed over Jamaica Plain, Cambridge, and Somerville, all focal points of the Hub’s cycling culture.

“They’re all in the downtown area, with the tourists and the wealthy people,’’ lamented 21-year-old Genesis Baez, who lives in Jamaica Plain. “There are a lot of families here, and the program should be for them, as well.’’

Nicole Freedman, the city’s director of bicycle programs, explained that the decision to concentrate the first batch of kiosks in downtown and surrounding neighborhoods was based on a simple calculus: Put bikes in the neighborhoods most densely packed with workers, tourists, and shops.

“We really want to keep stations every two- to four-hundred yards,’’ Freedman said. “When you start to spread it out, functionality is not as good.’’

Hubway administrators looked at the success and failure of bike-sharing programs in other cities, and noticed that the program worked only when there were many stations closely arranged. Bike-sharing programs fail, she said, when kiosks are spaced out, with just a few sprinkled around each neighborhood, or when clusters of kiosks are isolated from other clusters.

In those cases, she said, people are deterred from participating because they have to walk too far to reach a station.

But in coming months, she promised, Hubway will find its way into other corners of the city.

“We know we want to get into neighborhoods,’’ Freedman said. “But we want to make sure that we do it right.’’

The list of Hubway stations has not been finalized, and company administrators continue to shuffle sites, responding to public concerns about how the stations will affect car or pedestrian traffic.

At least one-quarter of the initial sites have been changed.