 Okay, we're back. We're live. It's 12 o'clock rock. I'm Jay Fiedel. This is ThinkTech. More important, this is Stan the Man, Stan the Energy Man. I don't look like Stan. Let me do it in some ways. But I am sitting in for Stan Osserman. And Laura McCartney is here. She's from Bikie, from Bike Share Hawaii, which is wonderful because we need to talk about that. We need to learn everything about it. We need to get everybody to understand it, to sympathize with it, to participate. Hi, Laurie. Hi, Jay. How are you? Thank you. Thank you for having me on today. How'd you get to be the CEO of Bike Share? That's probably a story right there. Well, I was actually happily retired. And I'm somebody who wants to make an impact on the city. I don't want to be a politician. It's like I don't want to do that. But what kind of skills do I have? And what kind of program could I support to help do that? And this is one I decided to sign up for. Yeah, what's it like being CEO of Bike Share? Because you're in the rollout mode. So this is more stressful, more demanding than any other time in the continuum of a business development. Interesting. I've been at this for almost three years now. And different phases of funding, of education and outreach, of selecting the equipment provider, working through the technology, understanding the user, understanding the city. Then rolling it out is like, how do you get all these Bikie stops out? And then right now we're going through the, what are the issues that we're facing? What are the customers facing? How do we improve those? And just trying to be better all the time. Yeah. Well, you're in transformational business, transforming a city that doesn't easily transform. One thing about Hawaii, it likes the way things used to be, not the way things would be. So anyway, yeah. So I admire you for achieving up to this point what you've achieved. And I sympathize with the fact that it wasn't easy. And you know, I would love to hear the detail. We don't have enough time for that. Sure. Of exactly. Yeah, we'd have to go have a beer. Yeah, right. The beer. Mounted the challenge of, you know, putting this together. But I, you know, one challenge though, one challenge is you had to get these bikes on the street. Buying them, it's okay. Publicizing, you can do that. But how did you get them on the street? There had to be 27 obstacles to get them on the street. Several obstacles. Some of them being, like you said, that people wanted the way it was. And actually, if you think about it, this would be the way it was, right? I agree, absolutely. And I think that's one of the things about an urban setting is that an urban setting used to be a lot different before the car entered the scene. And so taking it back to what urban settings are, you know, and the things people like to do, living close to where they work and being able to shop at the local retailer and eat and go buy flowers and, you know, and do all of those things without using a car, sort of where we're just sort of going back a little further than a lot of people remember. But the obstacles really get to change, you know, and what is it? And it's taking away something that I'm used to or, you know, how do you make that help people understand that? And that's complicated. I think that's one of the bigger things. Working with the city, also, when we're limited in space, it's like, where do you put bike share stations? Where do you put them? And our preference was first, if we had a wide enough sidewalk, because we have to have, we have to consider ADA, of course, and not block sidewalks. Oh, my goodness. So we have to make sure we have enough clearance there. And if we couldn't use a sidewalk space, then the next would be a place where parking wasn't allowed. But then you find out a lot of people cockroach that space for other purposes. But to be able to have a place where you weren't taking parking, and then the last place was taking parking. And we've seen the most, you know, actually, it's interesting if it's a business district, sometimes it's those non-parking spaces that are more important to the small businesses, because they're using them for loading or unloading or pausing or what have you, versus in a residential district, it's a parking space that somebody's sort of taken as their own, even though it's private property. It's a very interesting type of thing. And I'm a student of people. I like people and, you know, trying to figure out how they work. I can see that you would have to have the patience of Joe to deal with each, you know, single location and the problems that emerge and the people that may have other designs on that space and deal with that and somehow get them all there. And the one I mentioned before the show began is the one that really struck me was the one in Capulani Park, which is, let me say, I'll say this in French, it was parfait as a location for bike share. But what happened? Well, it's interesting, you know, and it's more complicated than I can really talk about, but there is a Capulani Park trust and they're interested in protecting the park and the use of the park and what have you. And then there's bike share. And we see bike share and beaky as access to the park. Because I don't know if you know now, if you go to the park, it's very jammed with a lot of cars trying to figure out where to park to get there. And so we saw that we could be an alternative way for people to get in. And what's happening now, interestingly, is that because we don't have stations in the park, so people will park at the closest they can get with their bikes. No, they'll be somewhere, let's say they're a visitor or a resident, and they want to go enjoy Capulani Park, they really can't. But what they can do is ride around it. So what we're seeing is people who are riding around it, because they don't have any place to park a bike share bike, you have to have a beaky stop there to do it. So I think we're missing out on serving a lot of the residents, the people who would say, I'm going to go to Kimana Beach, or I'm going to go over to the tennis court. We can't really serve them because there's no place for them to dock a bike. So bad. So we'll see. We'll see. I think the trust, I'm familiar with the trust, it's to protect Capulani Park. But you know, you can use Capulani Park. The idea is to make it accessible to the public. It's a public space. Yeah. So from our standpoint, we would like to be able to serve the people in the community so that they can enjoy the park. And so we'll just see how that goes. It's really not our call. No, no. But maybe it'll change later. Yeah, maybe. I mean, if I had an opportunity, I would say to the people involved, let them put beaky in Capulani Park. That's what I would say. Yeah. Anyway, okay. So you got through it. And on July 1st, you opened up with a thousand bikes and how many locations? So we're at 89 locations. Those are the Capulani Park ones. Yeah, 89. And I think people thought, boy, it happened so fast. You put them down, then you started. And it happened so fast. And whoa, we were caught by surprise. Well, we tried to do outreach. And it was interesting before to talk to people about bike share. And I don't know how many times I said, do you know what bike share is? It's where you check out a bike at one station, ride it one or two miles and check it in. I've probably said that a million times. But I think for most people until it really appeared, they didn't have an understanding of it. So it didn't really penetrate their brains as far as understanding what it was until we showed up. So for a lot of people, it was a surprise. Yeah, you have to see it. You have to see it. You have to see the stations and see the bikes and see the whole, see people doing it. Yeah. I was telling you that last Saturday I was on Fort Street Mall here. You have a station there at Fort Street. And was it? Fort Street and Hotel, there's one. And Hotel, yeah. And I was a woman who was depositing a bike. You know, she was checking it in and I was curious because, you know, I really care, I mean, I have a lot of care about this. So I started talking to her about it. She was from Switzerland. She was a tourist. She was in Waikiki. She picked up the bike in Waikiki. She drove it downtown. She was going to drive it back again. It was her way of getting around the city. And she had no fear, no obstacle at all. She was completely unhampered in what she was doing. It was what she wanted, what she expected, and certainly what she preferred. And, you know, that's a tourist mentality, European tourist mentality. But I think we have to achieve that mentality locally too. You know, it's interesting because we're all visitors and tourists at some time, right? Yeah. And the thing is that people come here from Chicago or New York or Portland or San Francisco, they come here and they're very comfortable too. Because as residents in their community, then they're used to using bike share. And so we're the top, we're, we were the only top 10 visitor destination without bike share. So when we people, when we see people that come in, because there's 60 cities on the mainland, of course, those guys are going to be more used to understanding how to use it because they use it at home as residents. And so here we also have a lot of residents that ride. And those are the stories that I like to see my hairdresser up on King Street or off of King Street. She actually walks from New Iwanu down to the station behind the Pali Long. And then she uses Biki to get to their salon and parks it nearby. And then she uses it to go to her yoga studio and then come back. And so she uses it that way. And people, there are so many people that want to maybe have one car instead of two or see if they can get by. Those are the people that I really get excited about because we're helping giving them an alternative that's eco-friendly and fun. And I write, I do most of my commuting by Biki now. Of course, this changes our city. This is transformational because once you have a critical mass of people who buy into that who say, I'll make this part of my life. I may not bike everywhere, but I'll bike sometimes and it'll help me out and actually do it. Then you're starting to transform and all the millennials look at you and say, something happening here. This is a real place. It's a walking city. Walking equals walking plus biking. Just to go to your point about other cities on the mainland. I was in New York a few months ago. And I noticed right down from the Pan Am building at 42nd Street. It's the most crowded. This is really a wild place. There's so many people happening. Grand Central Station is right there. Right in front of Grand Central Station, there's a bike share. A huge one. Huge one. Not many of the bikes were left. They were all out of the system. In New York City where the traffic is murderous, people A, the bike guys were not afraid and B, the traffic was respectful. You have to have both sides of that equation. You have to have both. It was interesting before I took this on. I like going to big cities too. I went to New York and I saw that. I actually saw a city bike in action and I thought, how could it work here? The roads are crummy when you're in Manhattan. You have taxis swerving to the side to pick people up. I saw bike share working. I thought, if it can work in Manhattan, why in the heck can't it work in Honolulu? Amen. It's true. I guess the question is, the proposition is that if you have more bikes, biking is safer. If you have more bikes, more people are encouraged to use bikes. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's a virtuous cycle. So are we going to have more than a thousand bikes and when? So our idea first is we've been operating for just over three weeks. So we've been operating for about three weeks and we want to take a time to really get urban Honolulu right. Where do we need to fill in stations? Where do we need to adjust some? What are the rider patterns? It's not super easy. We need to get big equipment out, but we can move them. And then really finesse that and really make sure that we know what we're doing really well. And then you say, okay, what other communities can we serve? One of the questions I get big time is how many residents ride and how many visitors ride? Everybody assumes it's a visitor amenity. The residents ride if it's in areas where residents live. Because really when you're thinking about a beaky stop, it's not just that beaky stop, it's that entry point into the full network. And you have to have enough of a convenient connection to that to make it work for people. The reason it works for me is I can use one that's a block away. If it was much further than that, I'd probably say it's not convenient. So in that standpoint, let's get this figured out. Then in six months or so, then let's look and see what are the financial resources? What are the communities that are asking for it? I've gotten calls from communities that are saying can you come talk to us? They think they do, yeah. But it doesn't necessarily make sense everywhere. You have to have that density of residences, businesses and attractions. Otherwise, if it's out in the middle of nowhere, you don't have enough people feeding it. And it doesn't make sense for us from an operational side to feed something or try to manage something that's way out in the hinterlands. So many wonderful decisions. I bet you're collecting data doing analytics. You're trying to do scatter shots and figure out where the best locations are. I think you migrate the stations in that direction. You listen to people. You have your ear to the ground, set the scope on all day long. Exactly. It's early to do that. But you start saying, well, here's a station that's not doing very well. How come it's only a block or a block and a half away? And you start to learn like real estate, location, location. It's how far will people go for something. But we also want to have stations close together so that if we do have a situation where one is full, you show up with your bike and the station's full, you need to have one close by sort of as a backup so that people don't say, well, this isn't going to work for me. So there's a lot of different things that are involved. But it is fascinating. It is fascinating. What about baskets? So there is a basket on the front. It's a bungee and a basket. Oh, okay. I didn't notice that. I didn't have a basket. Yeah. And I looked at clothes baskets, you know, like a regular wire type basket because I thought, well, personally, I thought that might be easier. And then what I realized was a couple of things. One is it can't hold odd-sized things. And they might bounce out. And the other one is that it's just a garbage collector. Very convenient to put your trash in a basket as you walk by. So for those two reasons... Oh, give me the pedestrian. Oh, that would be so stylish. Yeah. As I was looking at other cities, I was seeing that's one of the issues that they deal with. So, but this basket works really well. I can carry my laptop and my bag and I see people carrying all sorts of different things in it. A funny story, I heard somebody talking about they went to get plate lunch. And because it's sort of this shape, a plate lunch wouldn't necessarily work in there because it would leak out, you know, where it folds over. And so this one place they go to now, they'll say, I need a beaky pack. And so then they'll pack up the plate lunch in a container that will work to go in that way. So I thought that was a pretty cool story. That's Lauren McConaughey. She's the CEO of Bike Share Hawaii. Fabulous organization, which I believe will change and transform our community, is already changing and transforming our community. And when we come back from this break, I want to talk to Laurie about, you know, when she has time to take a breath after this really incredible start up here on July 1st and where she should go when she has the time. And the answer will be very interesting. The answer, and I'll explain why later, will be China, okay? Be right back with Laurie McConaughey. Aloha. My name is Raya Salter, and I'm the host of Power Up Hawaii, which you can see live from 1 to 130 every Tuesday at thinktechhawaii.com and then later on YouTube. I am an energy attorney, clean energy advocate and community outreach specialist. And on Power Up Hawaii, we come together to talk about how can Hawaii walk towards a clean, renewable, and just energy future. To do that, we talk to stakeholders all over the spectrum, from clean energy technology folks to community groups to politicians to regulators to the utility. So please join us Tuesdays at one o'clock for Power Up Hawaii. Okay, we're back. We're live. Wow. This is a great discussion. Laurie McConaughey, thank you so much for coming down. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Talking about Bike Share, the new way of getting around, the new way of attracting people to get around, the new human scale city. That's what we're building here. And this is connected, in my view, with option 2A in the rail that is going at grade, because if you go at grade, then you can pave in the streets downtown. You can put grass in the middle of Bishop Street. You can have bikes and connecting with rail at grade. I mean, it's a beautiful picture. It's European. It's out of some of the wonderful cities in France. And well, maybe one day, street corner cafes, you see it? Love it. Love street corner cafes. Anyway, China. That's where I think you need to go on your first vacation, should you ever have another one. And that means you should look at Ofo and you were familiar with the other. Ofo and Mobile can some of the other ones. And there are some, actually, some U.S. companies trying the same thing. Oh, is that right? Yeah. In the U.S. Yeah. In the U.S. Yeah. Most cities have not sort of figured out how to use them or if it's going to make sense in their city. And it's the interesting idea of saying, let's create excess capacity in bikes by putting a bunch of bikes on the street and then letting people use apps to use them. So it's like the idea of Uber, which people have excess capacity with their cars, and then you can access the excess capacity with an app. But since there isn't that with bikes, then it's like create that and then use the apps to access it. It's a very interesting idea. I was thinking about that for Honolulu. It wasn't at the time when we were making our selection, but there were things along that path. And one of the things I know in Honolulu was a couple of things. One was we like things a little neat and tidy and we like to know the expectation of that's where the bike's going to be. Also, we have communities, yeah, the neat and tidy place. And then also between the resident and visitor use, as you get to some of these other kinds of things that are app-related, you can't not everybody wants to use an app to use a bike. And so I know when I've been in other countries, I've gotten to places, Sweden being one and Germany being another place, where they're not really geared to any visitors at all. And so you have to have the app. You have to be able to be part of their transit system and everything to get it. And it sort of excludes some people. And for us, we believe that visitors, I mean, we're a community of visitors and residents and we really want it to be able to serve everybody. It's great for the good. We should have great support from the visitor industry as an industry because you give visitors another opportunity to see the city. See us where we live. You know, let's talk about the people in Hawaii where they never get out of Waikiti. They can't possibly appreciate it. But if you get on the street a little bit. And people, even residents, one of the first people said, I feel like I have a whole new city to explore now. Isn't that true? You know, I rode bike. I told you I raced bike way back when and I rode everywhere, not only in Oahu, but every island and all the highways and byways. And I got to know the city so well, so fast. It's not just the roads either. It's the whole lifestyle of people around, what they do, how they engage. You know, you get a whole different bird's eye, a close-up view of what our state, our city, is like if you're riding a bike. I'm enjoying commuting now. So I commute by Bikki and I used to commute by car because it was too far to walk, frankly. And so the option was a car. And now I find where our offices are right near Ward and Alamoana and I live downtown. So it takes me about eight minutes to get in by Bikki. But at that time, then I see a lot more, I actually associate more with people too. When you're in a car and you're all in that air-conditioned loveliness with your radio on and stuff, yeah, you're totally isolated. When you're out there, people wave or say hi or there goes a Bikki or, you know, you really, you make eye contact with people. And I think that's one of the things we're not doing enough with anymore is being connected to our fellow man. We've been waiting for decades to get to this really. And that's why it's very important. We used to be, you know, and I think that's the thing. We used to be like that. And with so many things that seem to be pulling us apart, why not take the opportunity to remember that we're all people again. And that's one of the things I'm enjoying and hearing people talk about that connection with people. So what about coming on a race, yeah? Three fifty a half an hour, that's a little steep. Yeah, don't buy it, don't pay that. Or you buy a package. Get on, go online to gobikki.org and or on the app and then you buy a package. And the package, thinking about how you might ride, if you're not sure how you're going to use it, then get the free spirit pass, twenty bucks, prepaid three hundred minutes, works out to six point seven cents a minute. And it's just use it, you know, you just pay as you go basically. So if my rides are eight minutes, then that's eight times six point seven, whatever that is. But it's, you know, about fifty cents or whatever for a ride. The minutes never expire. So I can just use it spontaneously as the need arises. Okay, so so if you're riding six minutes, then you just, and when you, when you put the bike into another stand, it stops. It stops. The clock stops, you pull it out, it starts and then you see the green light when you pull the bike out, that means when it starts and you put the, seeing the green light when you check it in, that's when it stops. This is comparable. And then you can, then you can see how it, you can see how many minutes you've used and what happened. This is comparable with, with other cities. This is a new one for us. I realized that the other plans that we have are more like that. But I thought, how do we reach people who aren't going to be consistent users? How do we make it affordable for them? So it's more of a spur of the moment or right now I need a way to get somewhere. Or I'm just going to use it occasionally. That's what this plan was for. Yeah. So how do you, how do you see this evolving going forward? I mean, I would like to see more bikes, more stations. I would like to see, I don't know, I don't know what, what would I like to see, Laurie? You must know. What I would like to see is more riders. We have a lot of ridership right now. We're already at over 36,000 used beaky trips. We've come on the website and no, they have made a trip. So we count how many times it's been used. And then we're tracking different stations to see how that goes. But my objective has always been to make it accessible and for it to work for as many kinds of people as possible. How do you adjust the number of bikes in one station is against another? I mean, that'd be a problem in China too. In China, they monitor everything with GPS. Right. And they get people, you know, come down the street and pick them up with a bunch over here and they take them back over there and the whole thing is equalized. That's what we do. It's all rebalancing is what they call it in the industry. So right now I could go to my computer and see what the status of every single station is. And you'll see the beaky van out. And what his job is is to move bikes around. So when we see there's a station full or almost full, you got to pull bikes out. You see when it's empty, you got to put bikes in. We're trying to figure out patterns so we can anticipate that better. But because we're still new, we're still figuring out what those patterns are. There's a big thing going on at the convention center. They gave us a heads up about that. So we know that we're actively servicing that right now because we want to try to, we want to make sure that we're serving the people where they need it. Something really touching about a beaky bike, a beaky bike truck going down the street. I hope you have a big sign on the side. It says, beaky bike. It does. And people cheer, hey, beaky bike. That would be nice. They do cheer on the bikes. I think that's what's fun. And we want it, the guy who's running our operations wants to change the horn on the beaky van to a ding, ding, ding. Like the ice cream truck. Yeah, more like a bank bell. Yeah. So we, we, we are a people business. I think that's one of the things, you know, we have a call center here. We have local people in a call center from 6am to 11pm, seven days a week. Because we want people to have a good experience. Why would I call? So you might get to a doc and say, I can't figure out how this works. Or I have a question about this, or I can't get the bike in, or I don't know how to adjust the seat, or it could be any kind of question. Okay. I want to ask you one last question, our remaining time, which is not all that much. And that is part of making bikes work, at least in Honolulu. And there are similar issues on the neighbor islands, but part of what you need is, is streets that are comfortable to ride. Absolutely. And that means bike lanes. Yeah. And it, in my view, this is my own personal view, it does not mean shallows. The shallow is a punt. You know, and I've been thinking, for example, I rode down McCulley Street. It goes down McCulley Street on one block, there's a bike lane. Next block is a shallow. Right. What? And then I got to get out of the bike lane, right in front of the cars. I got to navigate in front of the cars. Who may not understand where the shallow is. Nice. Right. Okay. And then the next block, I'm back on a bike lane. I say, this is really, I mean, maybe it costs the city less, but it is not a good, a safe solution. And so, you know, we have, block by block, an enormous job to do, to make this a truly bike-friendly city. So, although it's nice to have the bikes available, it's nice to have more riders, in order to move this ahead, you know, to make that, what did you call it? The virtuous cycle. Virtuous cycle, complete. You know, somebody has to fix the streets. Potholes is one small thing. It's the whole design of the streets and the bike lanes and the interaction. You know, if I do King Street, without doing the verticals, I mean, the North South, Malcolm Mackay, you know, what am I doing? I use one lane for a mile. Thank you very much. It needs to be everywhere. So, I mean, of course we agree, but the question is, and this is really important, HBL, to a limited degree, tries to do lobbying and political action in the city, and to some extent the state. And here's the thing. You are in an excellent position, an excellent, at least as good a position, because you're a commercial enterprise, not just a, you know, a recreational association. You're a commercial nonprofit, I think. Right, we are a nonprofit. But you're still a commercial organization and you have, you know, you have commercial activity happening within your business, so to speak. You have potentially tremendous clout to go to the city and say, you've got to make this place more bike-friendly. I know it's early for that, but I wonder what you think about that. I totally agree. I think what we have is not a commercial activity, but what we have is more people. I think the city has the desire to do more bike infrastructure. There's a bike plan to do it, and it's not that expensive. It's really the same kind of thing that we're focused, we're faced with, which is pushback and non-acceptance of it. The idea that, why would I give up a lane, a traffic lane, for a bike lane? And so the more people that are actually biking and they see more people biking and they experience them themselves, they're more likely to be supportive of them having a safer place to ride. And I think that's where, you know, trying to get to that tipping point, where there's enough people that every time the city tries to do something, they have two million people come out against it, is trying to get that balance there where people say, well, wait a minute, I actually used to be a couple of times. I'm comfortable on South Street and King Street, but I really want to be able to get around. I need more safe places to ride. You tell me I can't ride on the sidewalk. You want me to ride in the street. So I'm uncomfortable doing that. I have a personal mission to have more women riding, because I think that's something that women think for whatever reason, that bike share is not for them in other cities, but that's why I got a smaller bike. And that's why I also think that the idea of safety is more, it sounds funny, but it's a bigger issue for women than it is for men. And so that's where my reason, even for doing this, the passion for bike share is not about bike share at the end, it's about transforming the city. And that big part of it is the bike infrastructure and all those connections. And, you know, HBL is one of our greatest partners. And the city is too. I think we all have a similar vision of what we're trying to accomplish here, and we all have different strengths to bring to the table. The law of the broken paddle. We all have a right to the streets. You heard that before. Thank you, Laurie. It's great to have you here, and we have to talk to you again and again, and follow this wonderful journey, this adventure that you've started. Thank you. Thank you very much. Aloha. Aloha.