Metro biking across LA
The Metro Bike rental system in LA is patchy and frustratingly inconsistent; it's also recently been part of a terrifyingly stupid contract-bidding kerfuffle. Lyft was trying really hard to outbid the current vendor... and then the current vendor revealed that Lyft had been doing a little corruption during the bidding process. The system is cool and useful... but it's unclear who will be operating it in the future, or how ethically they'll be doing so.
It is also conspicuously missing hubs in a lot of the richer neighborhoods between my neighborhood and the neighborhoods surrounding downtown. Here's the map:
I live on the right edge of the western lump of stations in this image; I often commute to the eastern lump. If I want to use a Metro bike to bike home, I gotta cross the great void in the middle.
The current vendor which operates the LA bike rental system is BCycle/Bicycle Transit Systems, a company which operates a lot of bike rental systems I've seen in other cities too - most recently in El Paso. I am gonna complain a bit about these bikes in this post, but I can't complain about the current vendor... last year, I saw them at bike events like Ciclavia polling the public on how they'd like the great void in the center of the bike station map to be filled. Since I often cross that gap either on a Metro bike or with a friend on a Metro bike, I was able to give them pretty good info about the most convenient way to cross the gap.
When I bike from Koreatown to Culver City, I usually follow a route like this:
This route is entirely downhill and relatively unchallenging - it takes advantage of residential streets, bike lanes, and downhill topography. Still... it's, like, nine fucking miles long. That's easy for me, physically, but it does take a lot of time.
So: if I go home before midnight, I use the train instead. It's simply easier. But if I go home very late at night, and I don't have my personal bike, I must either pay 30+ USD for a rideshare home... or roll home on a Metro bike. I only use the Metro bike when everything has gone wrong: when I don't have my own bike, when I'm bad at following a schedule, and when I'm feeling particularly price-conscious.
Metro bikes - like almost every rent-a-bike in North America - are frustrating, mysterious machines. The fleet contains e-bikes, but it's hard to find them, and they often have too little charge to be useful. The rest of the bikes are robust step-through analog bikes with precisely three gears: a hill-climbing gear, a mystery gear I only use for starting after a red light... and then the gear you want to do everything in. This final gear is the one you usually have to use for flats, slight downhills, and slight climbs.
The gearing is probably the biggest reason I don't use these bikes more often. LA can be a hilly place, and the gears on these Metro bikes are not great for hills. Any trip from my location headed north or east will be an entirely uphill trip, since that vector takes you toward the Santa Monica mountain range. Therefore, I only use these rent-a-bikes to ride home.
I used one of these bikes last night because I went home after the trains had stopped. It was my first time using a Metro bike in around a year. Immediately, I had to confront the shitty gearing. My trip home was several MPH slower than my usual travel time, and I often found myself struggling to keep up a reasonable speed on long, flat straightaways.
That said... the bike was so slow I didn't feel particularly awkward about not having a helmet. On my regular bike, which has drop bars, I often feel like any collision would send me hurtling skull-first into a solid object. The Metro rental bikes are much more like Dutch city bikes... though not precisely the same. It feels safe and practical to bike on them without a helmet, since you're slow, you have an upright posture, and there's not much for you to worry about. I feel like if my brakes didn't work on a Metro bike, I could get an equal response from simply putting my feet down on the ground.
I think one reason I dislike riding these bikes is that they're meant for shorter trips than I usually take. I'm the kind of freak for whom a 13-mile cross-town trip is small... but these bikes are probably best suited for trips less than 4 or 5 miles total.
I'm hoping that by 2028 I will both see the Olympics and the sealing of the cross-town bicycle void of Beverly Hills/Mid city. In the meantime, I'm just hoping some of these smaller neighborhoods and municipalities in the middle of the city get their shit together faster and work with the current vendor to fill the great central gap!!