The Rise and Fall of Pronto: The First Bike-Sharing Program in Seattle
Team
Nussara (Firn) Tieanklin
Yuanjie (Tukey) Tu
Sandesh Adhikary
Britt Abrahamson
Background & Objectives
Despite having a robust biking infrastructure, Seattle is one of the few cities where a public bikesharing system has been decommissioned. Pronto Cycle Share, a non-profit bikeshare program, was launched in October 2014 and shut down in March 2017 after the city decided to eliminate the budget for the bikeshare program. The failure of the Pronto bikeshare network has partially been attributed to system design decisions, including inadequate station density and geographic coverage (ref). The rise and fall of the Pronto Cycle Share provides a unique case study on the design and implementation of micro-mobility networks in a major US city.
Since Pronto closed its stations, there have been many attempts at performing a post-mortem, including research paper by Peters and MacKenzie (2019), articles in Bloomberg and Seattle Times. While some of these analyses do provide some concrete data and visualizations, the arguments tend to speculate on how Pronto could have done things differently. In our visualizations, we summarized the major reasons why Pronto fail, and attempted to make some of these "what-if" scenarios more visceral by allowing the user to see what it would look like to better align Pronto stations with demand-mismatches that have been identified in the media. For instance, instead of speculating that it could have been better if Pronto was closer to restaurants, we wanted the users to be able to see what a food-oriented redesign would look like. In some instances, this interaction reveals how Pronto missed the mark (e.g. Pronto stations were not too accessible to many link stations), but in others it, hopefully, gives the user some intuition for why Pronto made the decision they did, i.e. to satsify the dueling objective of maximzing coverage and accessibility.
Instructions
To get the best experience in learning about The Rise and Fall of Pronto: The First Bike-Sharing Program in Seattle, we would recommend using Google Chrome browser at 100% zoom to run with a screen that has a resolution more than 1280 x 800 pixels and a size greater than 13 inches, if possible. The article was implemented and tested on a monitor of size 24 inches with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels.
Data Sources
Pronto Data: https://www.kaggle.com/pronto/cycle-share-dataset
Dockless bikes: http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs/programs/bike-program/bike-share
Point of interest data (POI): https://download.bbbike.org/osm/