The Columbus Park Foundation has identified at least three potential buyers for the bicycles and docking stations for the city’s soon-to-be defunct bike-share program.
The Indiana Pacers Bikeshare in Indianapolis, Red Bike in Cincinnati and a new potential bike-share program in Carmel are looking to expand operations and may be interested in acquiring and repurposing the former ColumBike bicycles and docking stations, said Victoria Griffin, vice president of the Columbus Park Foundation.
“We’re working with the B-Cycle people. They’re helping us (find potential buyers),” Griffin said Thursday after the Columbus Parks Foundation’s annual meeting.
The foundation announced on Sept. 19 that it would shut down the ColumBike program effective Nov. 1 due to declining ridership. ColumBike is offering free two-hour bicycle rentals through Oct. 31, foundation officials said.
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The foundation has been working with B-Cycle, which supplied the equipment for the program and several other programs across the country, to identify potential buyers for the program’s eight docking stations and some 42 bicycles, Griffin said.
Red Bike currently has 442 bicycles and 57 stations, according to its website. The Indiana Pacers Bikeshare has 251 bicycles and 29 stations.
“The Cincinnati one has actually come into northern Kentucky. They’ve moved across the (Ohio) River,” Griffin said. “…They’ve got that big Purple People Bridge over there that people can ride back and forth on.”
Launched by the foundation in May 2016, ColumBike has seen declining ridership since its inception, parks officials said.
Chip Orben, Columbus Parks Foundation president, said in an earlier interview that the foundation attempted to reduce costs as much as it could, but “we just didn’t have the ridership to make the program work.”
“We tried the free bike promotion,” Orben said. “We tried cutting the cost as far as we could. We tried soliciting additional sponsors. I’m not sure the appetite for the program was where it needed to be.”
It costs around $70,000 a year to run the program, organizers said. All of the money that had been invested in the program was raised privately by the park foundation, with no tax dollars utilized, said Mark Jones, director of the Columbus Parks and Recreation Department, in an earlier interview.
The ColumBike program was designed to emphasize healthy lifestyles, encouraging local workers to hop on a bike at lunch or for visitors to Columbus to sightsee, said former park foundation director April Williams in an earlier interview. Williams led the effort to establish the program, but has since left the foundation.
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Visit columbike.bcycle.com for more information.
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