 ThinkTecAway, civil engagement lives here. Hey, hello, and welcome to Stand the Energon on Friday the 13th, don't be too afraid, it's just me. Anyway, we've got a great show today, but in case you haven't noticed, there's a biker gang that's been taking over Honolulu, but they're not the ruthless evil biker gangs you're used to seeing on TV and in the press. These are nice bikers, some of them are tourists, some of them are local folks getting to work. There's a lot of bikers we want to see. So today's show we have as a guest, Lori from Bikeshare, Hawaii, and she's going to tell us all about what's been going on with Bikeshare and what about this bike gang that's taking over Honolulu, so Lori, thanks for being on the show with us today. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into doing what you're doing, and give us some basics on what's up in Bikeshare. Sure. It's really interesting for me, because I moved to Honolulu 20 years ago, and I think when I first came here I thought, oh, this would be a place that you'd be outside all the time, walking, biking, and whatever, and I was surprised at all the cars and how there weren't any options. I moved here from San Francisco and lived downtown, and I could take, I could walk, I could take the bus, I could take Muny, I could take, you know, taxi, I had all these different choices, and then depending on the day or what I felt like, I could take different things. And that choice wasn't here. And I thought, wow, it's really interesting. This is such a cool place. It's a beautiful place. Should be able to walk around more and bike around more and what have you. So when the opportunity came up and Bikeshare, Hawaii was formed, I thought, you know, I think this is something I can help make happen. Great. So the Bikis, as we call them, have been out there since, what, December or late last year sometime? So we were out in late June of last year. So it's been going on nine or 10 months. I should have counted that. Yes, I know. It's like one year baby anniversary. We are. Well, I suggest to maybe we have a baby luau, a beaky baby luau. Perfect. Yeah, and it's been an interesting, I've been involved with this project for three and a half years. I think that's one of the things that surprises people is people think it happened overnight. And it's like the guy who worked at the, you know, did little small parts in a show and all of a sudden gets this big starring role, but they've been working for 15 years towards that sort of feels like that a little bit. Okay. Yeah, and it's interesting because I've watched this grow. I've been in my position at Hcat for almost five years now. And it's a glacial pace when you're dealing with all the wickets that you have to go through to get these things going and get the funding right and get the permitting right and all that stuff. And we'll talk about that a little bit later, but it's nice to see things come together. And it's also interesting to see people prove wrong because some of the first things that came out when Bikis showed up on the streets is it'll never work. Nobody's going to use it. It ain't happening. You know, why would anybody want to ride a bike, blah, blah, blah. And much to my pleasure and surprise, I see more bike stands out there. I see more bikes out there. I see more people riding bikes out there. And all the naysayers have just kind of been proven at least partially wrong, pretty wrong as far as I'm concerned. But what kind of growth have you seen and what kind of good news and bad news story? What do you learn along the way? Those kind of things. We learn something every day. Okay. So besides the nobody's going to use it, it was also the bikes are going to all be stolen, they're going to, parrots are going to be ripped off, all sorts of things. And we had seen that that was the situation in other cities. Before was that idea of sort of, it's going to be terrible. But at least we had some best practices to look at. But what we keep learning is about who rides it, who doesn't ride it. What's keeping them from riding it? We've done a membership survey in October and we're actually going to do another one today, trying to sort out some of these things. Now we do know that ridership is low on rainy days. Yeah, makes sense. And higher on nicer days. That weekdays are higher than weekends. Because the majority of our rides are residents, about 65%. So then on Friday tends to be our biggest day because it both has a combination of people who are riding and commuting. And then people who are going Powhanna and visitors that have come in for a long weekend, and all of that. So that tends to be the biggest day for us. Yeah, the last week show we had Lee Chamberlain from Maui, who rents out electric bikes and sells them also. He sells and rents. And his, of course, his market is mostly tourists for the rentals. But he says that it's going gangbusters over there and people really love it. And he's into non-electrified bikes, too. In fact, he was going to ride a regular bike and his wife was going to use an electric bike to kind of, he's an athlete. He was going to let his wife keep up. But then he tried an electric bike and he has totally sold on it and that's all he's doing. But it's amazing to me, like you say, that we live in the perfect place where it's usually sunny, especially in the summertime. And trade wins and all. Why can't you jump on a bike to go a few blocks instead of jumping in your car or fighting for, I get to places faster on my bike than people driving because I don't have to find a parking place. The hardest part for me sometimes is finding a place to chain my bike up because there's mopeds chain there or there's no place to chain them up, especially outside the core of the city here. So I've got to go find a sign or a tree or something to chain my bike to. But it's interesting. I think it's going to grow. And I'm happy to say it's not just tourists using it. Most of the folks I see aren't tourists using it. They've got a briefcase on the back. It's neat that you have the basket in the front. That's pretty utilitarian. A lot of people use that to go shopping and take care of small errands. But here we are in Hawaii and all the gyms that you pay membership for are doing gangbusters and that scratches my head too. I'm like, just like the bikes, why are we paying for gym membership when we could go rent a beaky and go ride around? Well, that's the cool thing about beaky is that it can be used for a lot of different things. So I use it primarily for getting, for short trips. I drive too, I'm not against cars. But sometimes there's times where it's just easier. As you talk about it, I live downtown and I work in Kakaako or Ward area. And so for me to hop on a beaky, get it downstairs. I put my laptop on the front. I put my purse in the front. I wear what I'm wearing right now. I wear a dress, whatever. And I get to the office in like 12 minutes. And that's from door to door. I didn't know if I was sweaty or anything. It's usually an easy pedal. No, I gotta say, 20 minutes, then you'll start to sweat. They're sort of like this, I actually tested it out because one of my goals was to get more women riding. And so what were the factors that would make a difference in that? And one of them was the comfort of the bike and the feeling that the bike was something that they could handle. But the other thing was that the trips would be short and that they could wear makeup and your hair can look okay. And you can wear a dress. And so we actually have, yeah, you don't have to worry about that unless you're Scottish, I guess, or you're killed. But we actually found that we have 43% of our rides are taken by women. The national average is 34%. So some of the things that we put in place to help encourage women to ride make a difference. And I think one of the things is like, people have this picture in their head of who a bicyclist is. And I don't think that beaky riders are bicyclists. I think you're right. They don't think of themselves that way. And that's good. I mean, our goal was not to appeal to people who already bike, because they already bike. It's like, how do we bring biking as a transportation option or an exercise option to people who don't? So how can it be a mainstream, everybody does it thing? And so that's what's interesting to me is they're not cyclists and I would never even consider them that way. Yeah, in fact, Lee last week mentioned, he drew the distinction and said, you got the Spandex guys and you got everybody else. And he said, cargo bikes are amazing. You can put 400 something pounds on a cargo bike and do all kind of, you know, carry your family or a bunch of groceries or whatever. And that's not biking in his. It's like, it's transportation. Yeah, it's a different animal. And I think, I'm sure Lee, and you know, as you go to other places around the world or even around the country, you see some of those things in place. And it gives you this idea about, this is about transportation for everybody. Yeah, you just made me flashback. I used to travel a lot to Asia and I remember going to Vietnam and seeing all these bikes and mopeds just crowding the streets. But as they get more and more money, they want to drive cars. And I'm just going, it's going to be pure chaos when they have cars mixed in with all these bikes. It's just going to be, it's going to be a carnage. It's just going to be ugly. But they, that's their mode of transportation. I've seen refrigerators carried on bikes. I've seen huge big screen TVs. It's amazing what a bike can do. It is amazing. I was in Vietnam not that long ago too and I actually rode a bike over there. And that was a very interesting experience because the congestion of bikes was something that I wasn't used to. Exactly. And you know how you go there and cross a street and they say, just go, don't worry about it. You know, just cross. It's scary but it works. It was scary and it works. And it was the same thing with the bikes. It was this ability to just sort of know where people are, same in Copenhagen and stuff, you see a similar thing. Where people are very comfortable, they don't need the space like, I feel I need. You know, I need a margin of room to feel comfortable but I guess that's how people adapt in time. Yeah. So what were some of the other fun things you learned as Beaky started growing from its roots a year ago? So some of the fun things that we learned is that people will use it for exercise. We didn't even think about that. So we know a few people who have told us that they get the $25 a month plan which gives them unlimited rides up to 60 minutes. So they could do it 20 times a day. Well, I don't know if there's enough hours in the day but they could take as many rides in the month as they want for $25 as long as they're under an hour. So there's some people, that's what they do for exercise. So they go down to a Beaky station, they check out a bike, they have a membership card, they check it out right around for 45 minutes or so, check the bike in and voila, they have their exercise. That technique worked well for me. You wouldn't know if I'm looking at me right now but when I was a younger individual and I was going to flight school, my wife was pregnant so the car stayed home with her. And for a year, I rode my bike to work every day. It was six miles to work and I'd ride to work, home for lunch, back to work, back up to work. And I stayed in better shape just from those four trips a day than if I'd run 20, 30, 40 minutes every day and worked out in the gym. It's really good exercise and I was surprised. I wasn't shocked but I was really surprised that the younger guys in my unit were totally out of shape because they weren't doing anything and I was just smoking past them on the running track because the bike, the bike got me in good shape. I think it was Jenny Pressler, Dr. Jenny Pressler, Department of Health, who said that society's done a great job of engineering any kind of exercise out of our daily lives. Exactly. And it's, if you think go back, it was part of what was just part of what we did as human beings and some of the more post mail carriers. You know, they walked and it was all part of it and I think that's along with the exercise story, there's the side benefit of using it as commuting and we've also heard stories of somebody at one of the publications here who said that they started riding to and from and then it gave them the idea, oh, you know, I feel a little bit better and then they adjusted their eating habits a little bit and they lost 30 pounds. And it's like, well, that's great. Those are great success strategies. You gotta write some articles for HMSA about that. Yeah, we should. They have a great publication and it goes out to a lot of people in Hawaii. No, that would be good. That would probably help your business too. And they're a donor of ours. You know, we're a non-profit and they support us and we appreciate that. Yeah, Lori, do a story for them. I'm sure they'd publish it. Great. Yeah. So the one thing I always wondered about is, you know, I mean, I'm a information technology, I don't wanna say fanatic, but I don't like it. I'm petrified about putting too much of my personal information online or using a computer to buy stuff. Sure. So you got your charge card and you go to a beach station and you run and I don't want you to give away any fragilities of your system or frailties, but are you running into any problems with the charge cards and getting your passes and things like that? No, one of the main things is we understand that we don't want anybody to be defrauding or doing any of the skimming or anything that happened at some of these that can happen out there. So we do have safeguards in place. We do not store anybody's credit card information that all sits with a financial institution. That's really not our core competency. So we work through a payment gateway and all of those are secure and, you know, heavily monitored in order for us to be able to get to you. Is that a big comfort factor, I think, for a lot of people, especially in my generation or particularly with my background in the military, I know what can be done and it scares the bhajibis out of me. I went to the bank one day to transfer some money and they said, oh, you can just go online and do that. And I go, I can, but I'm not going to. And I refuse to do it. And they were looking at me like, why it's so easy? I go, that's the problem. It's so easy. If it's easy, other people can take advantage and break in and manipulate it. I go, I don't do important things like finances online. I may buy with my credit card, but I usually go through PayPal or somebody, things like that. I have one place for my charge card, it's registered and that's it. But it's good that you thought about that up front because a lot of businesses are a little behind on that and it's a really important thing to consider at this day and age. We want to try to keep our customers' information as safe as we can and give them good access to Beaky but also have the safeguards in place to try to help block any fraud or skimming or any of the other negative things that could happen. That's good news. Well, we're gonna take a quick break here and get back with Laurie in a few seconds and find a little bit more about what's been happened in the Beaky world here in Honolulu. Hi, I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark and every Monday at one o'clock, I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's research in Monart. And at that program, we bring to you a whole range of new scientific results from the university, ranging from everything from exploring the solar system to looking at the earth from space, going underwater, talking about earthquakes and volcanoes and other things which have a direct relevance not only to Hawaii, but also to our economy. So please try and join me one o'clock on a Monday afternoon to Think Tech Hawaii's research in Monart and see you then. Good afternoon, my name is Howard Wigg. I am the proud host of Code Green, a program on Think Tech Hawaii. We show at three o'clock in the afternoon every other Monday. My guests are specialists both from here and the mainland on energy efficiency, which means you do more for less electricity and you're generally safer and more comfortable while you're keeping dollars in your pocket. Hey, hello, and welcome back to Standard Energy Man where we're doing bikes this month, apparently. We were on Maui doing bikes last week and today we're on Oahu doing bikes and Buck and Laurie from Bikeshare, Hawaii and kind of getting a feel for how the Bikie bike is doing in Honolulu and apparently it's doing pretty darn good and surprising us in a lot of ways like for exercise rather than just transportation and maybe more women riding bikes here than on other places on the mainland. So some interesting things happening. So another interesting thing is, you're kind of a different business or a different model so how does all that work? I mean, how do you put it all together and make it all happen? I mean, we're very different than almost anybody I can think of. We're what I call a P4. So we're a public-private nonprofit partnership. When the city did a feasibility study about bikeshare in 2013, they identified the idea that probably the best way to organize it would be to set up a nonprofit, support it initially, because then it would be able to operate a little bit more freely than if it was within the city. But then control it, right? So we work closely with the city. So the city and now the state, new age and different people, we only go where we're permitted to go when we have all of the approvals to go. So that's the public nonprofit side of it. And then we have a for-profit operator. And the other reason, so the for-profit operator invested in the equipment and is doing all of the operations. So they're the ones taking most of the financial risk which is pretty interesting. And I was like, why would they do that? So it's almost like on the utility side, like a power purchase agreement where... That I don't know. You're telling me. Where you have an entity that comes to your house and says, I'll put the solar on your roof. I'll maintain it. I'll take care of it if it breaks. You just owe me the amount of money you'd pay for electricity. Yeah, maybe. So a company is actually owning the equipment, operating the equipment, repairing the equipment, like you're leasing it. But they're working through a nonprofit instead of a personal purchaser. Yeah, maybe the difference, a slight difference, is that there you have no guarantees of what money they're gonna make. That's true. So I think it's interesting in that, the reason that they would do it is that on the mainland, there's one big bike share operator and not much competition. So one of the things they thought was if we can come in here and do a good job for the community here, then it gives us something in our portfolio to go pitch other business. So that was where some of the risks to them. So in that regard, we work under an agreement with the city and then they work under an agreement with us and it's multi-year. And then we're talking about expansion. So in that case, now we have another source of funding, which is federal TAP funding, Transportation Alternative Program. So that's been come in through the state and then that's devoted to bike share equipment. And so that's what funds the expansion. So we'll have equipment that's owned by the public and equipment that's owned by private and then we'll hold it all together. So cuddling all that together means that bike share Hawaii, we're supported by grants and donations, we're a nonprofit. Also the initial startup funding that we got from the city and the state to do everything to get it ready to go and get us on our feet. And then the operator looks for fair revenue to help offset their operating costs and their costs. So what's interesting in all of that is I think a lot of people think we're making a lot of money because they see so many people riding it. And that's fair. I would think the same thing too. But because it's residents and because we wanted residents to ride and when I conceived it, it was, we want more ridership at a lower margin than. I remember that. I remember that being kind of controversial. Yeah, it was like, let's get more residents riding. And so in that case though, if it's $15 in a month, I could ride 10 times a month or 60 times a month, which is more like what I do. It's not increasing the revenue. It's increasing the value to me, but it's not increasing revenue towards operations. Yeah, that was actually one of the critiques I heard early on this, you're not charging enough. And then others are saying, you're charging too much for local people. That to me was kind of weird. So I went, how can that be at the rate that takes to drive a car with insurance and gas and everything else? And parking, how can you be more expensive? But you guys, for a great structure, was good. We wanted people riding it because the idea is not having price be a hurdle for them. So that's why we have the $15 monthly plan. But what's most popular is what we call the free spirit plan. So the free spirit plan for 20 bucks, you get 300 minutes that don't expire. Well, they expire in 10 years. And so that you're ready to ride whenever. So you don't have, so you can use it spontaneously. And I think that's a way, it's like, I'm gonna drive today or I can't, something comes up, I'll use B-key. People can get into it that way. So you purchase the 360 minutes, is 360? 300 minutes, so it's like five hours. And then what happens then, you check out a bike, clock starts, tick, tick, tick, tick. And when you stick it in, stops. And then it subtracts that from the 300. And so when you get up to 285 or 290, maybe another 300 minutes? Yeah, so there's auto-renew, which is what we suggest people do, because it's only gonna auto-renew if you're using it. And then it keeps you out of those kinds of situations where it's like, now I just got an overtime fee, cause I didn't renew and I didn't do it in time. You guys thought of everything. Tried to think of stuff. So let's put up that map of where the bike stations are going so people can stop, freeze on the YouTube video here and check and see where their nearest station is. But you got a pretty good expansion in there. I like to see Diamondhead in that cause I used to have an office over in that area and that's actually a really great place to ride a bike, I don't copy on any park in Diamondhead. But you mentioned that not only the counties, but the university had to be kind of part of this consortium to pull it all together. How do you get into other communities? I mean, you approach like Mililani or Kailua and say, hey, we wanna expand into your area. Is that something you're looking at in the future? Or have you got like a very structured plan to do those things or neighbor islands? Or what are you kind of thinking long term? So the first feasibility study covered urban Honolulu and some of the obvious places. So we're using that as our first place to look. That's part of the expansion that we're in now is really sort of executing what it said to do the first time. We didn't have enough money to do as much as in the first iteration. And then the plan is to do a full plan for the whole state. And then in that case, then you see bike share doesn't make sense everywhere. It's like, where does it make sense? And where do other modes, whether it's electric bikes or whatever in different places when you have higher distances or hills or whatever, try to cobble together the right thing for that. And there's different kinds of bike share too. So initially what we're looking at is between our initial, the initial feasibility study and then also what we've heard from people. People were like, why aren't you at UH? And it's like, well, easier said than done. But now we do have a right of entry with the University of Hawaii in Manoa. And then you say, well, if we're gonna be there, then where are people coming from? And that's where you get into the Upper McKee-Kee area where you have all that density. And then also into the Macaulay Mo'ili-Eli. We've been light there, so trying to fill that in. And then fill in some of the areas where we're not as, where we just don't have the presence we need to be have. And then Evelay is interesting. We want to provide this to the full community and not just say, well, we're just serving the wealthy areas. Evelay is an interesting place. There's a lot of business down there. There's a big theater down there. There's a lot of opportunity for us to be able to serve more people. And it connects into the Chinatown area. So that's another area. And then the Diamondhead Kapa Hulu is perhaps a little bit more recreational in the sense that people are going up to the farmer's market or they just want to ride around Diamondhead, which you can do on a beaky bike. It's geared very, it's geared, you go in the lowest gear and you're not going fast. But you can get up the hill. So that people can go to places they want to go. They need to have a beaky stop there. So otherwise it's just a ride around. But if they want to stop and have coffee or go to the farmer's market or whatever it. So that's for the expansion. But one of the important things that I'm learning in the hydrogen transportation side is that the infrastructure is kind of important. So your partnership with the city must help quite a bit in terms of you at least have some significant input on bike lanes and maybe making multi-mode walkways and bikeways that would benefit like companies or businesses that are along those things. Because I've talked to city council and the stuff and they go, hey, if we did that over there, it'd kill all the parking, the vendors would go up in arms, we'd have protests at city hall. Like we can't take away the on-street parking, we can't do this and that. But in the bigger picture sense, if you did something on a much grander Fort Street mall that went east to west and you had much more foot traffic and bike traffic going by these stores and not have to worry about finding a parking place because it's easy to get there now, there'd be a benefit. So what are you guys kind of looking at with the city on the infrastructure side? So we are the, somebody's a chicken and somebody's an egg and I'm not sure which is which. But the city does have a complete streets program where they look for opportunities to be able to improve the walkability and bikeability when they have a project going on. We stay aware of those things. I think how Beaky contributes is that we do provide data to the city and we have an open API also, so we provide it to anybody who can use it as far as our usage data, not individual data, but trip data. And then people can see, well, where are people going? They're starting here and ending here. That kind of information. So you say, well, we don't know, because they're not GPS enabled in that sense. We don't know exactly the route, but we can infer it. And so that helps support, I think, what people want from a bikeable walkable place. The challenge has always been, if you put in a bike lane and nobody rides it, then the people who are, when they're driving, say, why did you take away? Why did you take away that lane? If you have people on bikes and they're riding on the sidewalk or they're riding somewhere where it's not particularly safe, and people say, why don't you have a place? Yeah, so it starts this cycle of people thinking about it. And when we're doing 26, we did 3,000 trips on Tuesday. We're over, well, over 600,000 trips to date. When that many mainstream people, I would say, are using bikes, then that helps create more of a political support for some of the kinds of things to be done. And people then that can go out and say, yeah, this is something we want. We know safety, perceived safety is the main reason people don't bike. Yeah, I definitely will stay on the streets if I feel safe. But the things that impact me riding my bike are the potholes that are on some of the streets, the narrowness when you have parked cars on one side where somebody can swing a door open in front of you, and then the amounts of space in the lane next to you to get around that without getting hit by a car, that impacts me. And when I see that, I'll get on the sidewalk. I don't ride fast on the sidewalk. I'll move as slow as a pedestrian because it's their space. But if I can't ride on the street, that's what I'm forced to do. And unfortunately, the police can be really strict on that. And so they'll start citing people on the sidewalk and that's not good. Because sometimes as a person on a bike, not the bicyclist, you're not trying to do speed racing on this thing. You just want to get someplace. You don't have the options staying on the street. So if there's one input I can make to all these guys, it's like, hey, let's do a little bit better job of looking at those spaces and making it safe for bikes to get around. Totally. I think that that's very helpful. The other thing that I hope is more people that get on a beaky than when they get behind the wheel, they'll think more about what it's like to be on the bike. And I think all of us, one of the things that just seems like we don't do as much is think about we're all people. You know, sometimes I'm driving a car, sometimes on a bike, sometimes I'm walking. But I'm hoping that people around me are thinking of me as the same person, no matter what vehicle, whatever vehicle I'm choosing at that time mode. Well, believe it or not, Lori, we've hit the end of our 30 minutes and it's time to wrap it up. So we're going to give you another year or maybe six months to collect some data and we'll have you back to talk more about beaky success and maybe where you're growing into. But thanks for coming on the show today. We'd love to. Thank you very much. Appreciate the time. Thank you for having me. Thanks. Okay, so until next Friday in Staten Energy Man, we're signing off. Thanks to Cindy and Robert here in the control room in the studio for keeping our act together. And we'll look forward to seeing you next Friday. Aloha.