Oneonta Considers

Bike-Share Program

By JENNIFER HILL • Special to www.AllOTSEGO.com

ONEONTA –The city is moving toward establishing a Bike Share and Microbility Program, with Mayor Gary Herzig asserting, “A bike share is a good thing.”

“But there are many different models of bike shares,” Herzig said in the Council’s Legislative Committee meeting this evening, “And we want to make sure that we control what model we put in here,  how it operates, and that it’s what’s best for the community.”

The two main bike share models are dock stations versus dockless setups.  “With dock stations, you must start and complete your trip at a dock,” Herzig said.  “In a dockless model, a company will come in and put their bikes and electric scooters on the streets. You go up with your app on your phone, you unlock it, you ride it to wherever you want and leave it wherever you want and you lock it with your app.”

The key difference for the city, the mayor said, was a dock model “requires the municipality to pay for them and the bikes don’t go anywhere the municipality doesn’t want them.”

With a dockless model, Herzig said, “The advantage there is the city doesn’t have to pay for it, but the company can just show up in a city without the city’s permission with truckloads of bicycles and start putting them around town.”

Herzig suggested a dock station bike share program was better for Oneonta.  “We have narrow sidewalks, we have college students, and hills,” he said.

However, city attorney David Merzig expressed skepticism that Oneonta was a good city to have a bike share program.  “Bike share programs are most frequently done in larger urban areas and warmer climates,” he said.  “The investment in the units and developing an infrastructure to maintain them and charge them and collect them is difficult in an environment such as ours. “

But Herzig said that bike share programs were expanding “rapidly” in small cities and cited Amsterdam as an example of one that had recently established one.

The mayor asked Merzig draft a “placeholder that asserts the city’s authority to have some control over the bikeshare,” suggesting Oneonta will adopt the dock station model.  Merzig will present it in the next Legislative Committee meeting.