Wednesday Morning Commute - "Forever Bicycles", was that the one with Clooney?

Good morning. Let us know if you see Obama. My friend had Sasha and Malia trick-or-treat at her house. How cool is that? But she's a Republican so she gave them each a ladle full of hot chili.

• Capital bikeshare station expansion begins. First station expanded - 16th and Harvard. Enjoy.
• WABA's Call to action summit is on Thursday
• BRAC funding in Virginia: "In addition to widening Route 1, the Belvoir project will include sidewalks and bicycle paths and accommodations for future transit. Construction is expected to start in 2013 with possible completion in 2015."
• Collecting abandoned bikes for the less fortunate is a Mitzvah!
• Bicycle parking facility, similar to the one in College Park is planned for the Franconia-Springfield Metro. "WMATA is in the final stages of planning an indoor, enclosed bike parking facility at Franconia-Springfield Metro station. It will likely be located in the new parking garage. The project is funded through a TIGER I grant for multimodal improvements at the station."
• Bike paths are infrastructure [Warning link is to conservative website].
• “Forever Bicycles” is made of 1,000 bicycles installed in a 10-meter high space in a moving, abstract shape to symbolize the way in which the social environment in China is changing. It probably won't fit in your basement.

Comments

[Daniel Gohlke]

Interestingly, even though the CaBi station at 16 & Harvard was expanded from 15 to 32 (or 33) docks yesterday, it still ran empty by 9:00 AM this morning. It started the morning at 7:41 AM with 28 bikes and by 8:44 AM, it was fully depleted. What a well placed expansion!
Source*: http://www.cabitracker.com/station.php?id=17&s=2011-11-02&e=2011-11-02

*I recently updated cabitracker to allow passing dates into the station page. Use the format above, s=[start date] e=[end date]. we=false will turn weekends off and wd=false will turn weekdays off. It requires both start and end times if you wish to pass in dates.

[Will]

Daniel,

Great analysis. I'll add that yesterday, this station ran out of bikes at 8:04 AM, while today it ran out at 8:44. For someone like me that's a late riser, that's a pretty important extra 40 minutes.

Thinking about this more broadly, I wonder if CaBi will follow the fundamental rule of traffic engineering, which is that as you build extra capacity, that capacity is almost immediately used up as more people choose that mode. For highway engineering, this is the poison pill behind every "we'll widen the road to relieve congestion" argument, however, since CaBi is a significantly more benign mode of personal travel, this principal works in its favor, and argues for significant and rapid expansion.

[Daniel Gohlke]

Will, you're right that the station ran empty at 8:04 on Tuesday.
source: http://www.cabitracker.com/station.php?id=17&s=2011-11-01&e=2011-11-01
A similar thing happened Monday. However, that is not the normal trend. Look at the month of October, excluding weekends:
http://www.cabitracker.com/station.php?id=17&s=2011-10-01&e=2011-10-31&we=false
You'll see that the station hit its lowest number of average bikes available during AM rush hour at 8:33 AM.