Big cities, such as New York City, are celebrated for their successful bikesharing programs,
with thousands of bikes and hundreds of smart docking stations. For
smaller cities and towns, however, this is not a practical model.
Big and small cities have the same need for bikesharing: to fill
transportation gaps, reduce traffic and parking congestion, promote
sustainability, build a bike a pedestrian culture, promote active
lifestyles, and support local business. They differ, however, in the
following ways: small cities have lower densities, established driving
cultures, and a smaller tax base.
In a recent webinar, bikesharing provider Zagster and the Shared Use Mobility Center,
a public interest organization working to foster collaboration in
shared mobility, spotlighted flexible bikesharing systems, in which the
technology necessary to borrow and lock a bike resides in the bikes
themselves rather than in expensive, fixed docking stations.
Flexible bikesharing offers an alternative that's more realistic for
smaller budgets and ridership. Where traditional bikesharing systems can
take millions of dollars and years to implement, flexible bikesharing,
which uses lightweight kiosks or even bike racks as hubs, can be quickly
and affordably tested and implemented.
The webinar was designed to give those living in cities with less
than 50,000 people an overview of flexible bikesharing systems,
including the benefits and challenges of launching one. Here are the key
takeaways:
Benefits of Tech-on-bike, Flexible Bikesharing
There are fewer “ingredients” with flexible bikesharing. All you need is a bike, though kiosks and racks are helpful.
Flexible bikesharing melds into the streetscape as it has a lower profile footprint
The hardware is lightweight
Data gathered from bikes during demos and pilot programs can inform project planning
Riders can access to the bike system via an app
Flexible bike sharing is easy and inexpensive to upgrade
It’s an investment toward more bike infrastructure in cities
It’s easy to install and move
Equity
Flexible bikesharing enables cities to diversify their fleet of bikes
to include accessible bikes for riders that would otherwise be unable
to participate in bikesharing. While flexible bikesharing is generally
accessed with a smartphone, a smartphone is not necessary. You can use
simple SMS/text messaging or even a code given out at a local library or
community center.
Funding
There are various funding models, including nonprofits, businesses,
advocacy groups, government organizations, real estate organizations and
universities. Fort Collins, Colorado is an interesting case study as
its collaborative sponsorship model includes public funding, nonprofits,
advocacy organizations, and businesses.
Grant funding sources at the federal level may include Congestion
Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ), STP Transportation Enhancements,
Transportation Investments Generation Economic Recovery (TIGER). Grant
funding sources at a local level may include energy and R&D pilot
funds, public health grants, parking credits, toll revenues and
affordable housing funds.
Scaling
Flexible bikesharing allows cities to easily and affordably test
pilot programs before scaling. Scaling to more neighborhoods and
surrounding municipalities is easier and less expensive than with
traditional, docking bikesharing systems. Payment can be integrated with
existing public transit payment systems, such as transit cards.
Challenges of Flexible Bikesharing
Flexible bikesharing is not as visible as traditional bikesharing systems with docking stations.
It’s still relatively new so there’s limited data about sponsorship and models
Long-term and/or high-volume durability is unknown
Flexible bikesharing is less friendly for a tourist who may not be
interested in downloading app and learning how the bikesharing system
works.
Small cities have to determine whether they’re targeting their bikesharing system for residents or tourists.
Many years ago, while researching the history of the U.S. decision to
use atomic weapons on the people of Japan, I came to understand
something: there was something deep at work in the American political
and economic system driving it toward relentless expansion and a
dangerous, informal imperialism.
I began thinking about how to
fundamentally change America out of concern with what America was
doing - and is still doing - to the rest of the world.
Many experiences since - especially working in the U.S. House, Senate,
and at upper levels of the State Department trying to resist the war in
Vietnam; and thereafter with activists in the antiwar and civil rights
movements - taught me something important: it wasn’t enough to stand in
opposition to the injustices America inflicted on the world and its own
people. It was equally important for these movements to operate with an
idea of what they want instead.
Could we imagine a system that undercuts the logic responsible for so much suffering at home and abroad?
It was reflections like these that brought me to first sketch the
idea of a “pluralist commonwealth” - an economic and political system
different from both corporate capitalism and state socialism grounded in
democratic ownership, decentralization, and community that could
fulfill two key functions.
On one hand, it offered a general map of
where we might want to go - a design for a next system in which a
plurality of overlapping institutions reinforce each other to
democratize our common wealth. On the other hand (and unlike other more
utopian blueprints), I’ve always believed that the Pluralist
Commonwealth, grounded in everyday American reality - like the deep
cooperative tradition of the Wisconsin where I grew up - was also an
effective guide to how we might actually get there.
While progress is never strictly linear, I believe that we are
beginning to see an accelerating development of the foundations for a
system that looks a lot like the Pluralist Commonwealth, and a growing
recognition of how they begin to fit together.
So how do we maintain and deepen the momentum? Here are six areas
where it’s particularly strategic to be organizing and building
institutional power in the current moment.
1. Public banking: take it to the cities
Public banking, which invests capital for the common good rather than
Wall Street’s bottom line, has existed at the state level for nearly
100 years in North Dakota.
Now, activists are taking this model to cities and uncovering exciting possibilities. In
Santa Fe, for instance, organizers have worked with Mayor Javier
Gonzales to begin serious consideration of a municipal-level public
bank. As an official city study
released earlier this year showed, instead of the city’s $200 million
in cash deposits sitting in large, non-local financial institutions, a
municipal public bank could leverage those deposits to reduce borrowing
costs for the city - saving millions of dollars of taxpayer money every
year that would otherwise go toward costly bond offerings.
Similar efforts in Philadelphia
and other cities are also picking up steam as more and more people
discover just how much money is wasted on Wall Street to finance the
growth and development of city infrastructure. Why make a bond trader
rich when you could build better schools and lower taxes instead?
The publicly owned Bank of North Dakota
has long strengthened the state economy, expanded access to affordable
credit, and contributed its revenues to supporting vital services like
education. But the institution is also the product of a unique history,
in which progressive populism was able to use the state Legislature to
create this innovation. Today, in the face of relatively unresponsive
state legislatures, progressives are proving that cities are promising
spaces to channel energies for creative action.
By demonstrating the power of finance as a public utility, the public
banking movement is building momentum for and giving shape to a
democratic system of investment that is much larger. Public banks,
credit unions, and community development financial institutions can all
grow over time to displace the financialized, profit-seeking banking
sector, helping turn the tables to put the public’s money to work for
the benefit of everyone.
2. Worker ownership: build the ecosystem for economic democracy
There’s been an explosion of interest in worker cooperatives
as a simple solution to begin democratizing ownership of the economy.
An ecosystem is emerging that allows people all across the country to
accelerate these cooperatives’ development by engaging local governments
for support, converting existing businesses, or even investing personal
savings into their expansion.
Worker cooperatives, by directly shifting ownership and control of
the workplace to workers themselves, are some of the most intuitive and
immediately appealing institutions of the Pluralist Commonwealth.
Studies show that worker-owned companies don’t just democratize wealth,
they can also operate more efficiently and are more likely to stay in business than “normal” firms.
Yet while there are more than 10 million Americans working in
companies in which they also own a share, the number of worker
cooperatives - where these shares are equal for all workers, and come with
an equal vote in the future of the business - is far smaller.
But this isn’t because of some intrinsic problem with worker co-ops.
Traditional businesses, in which workers labor for someone else’s
profit, have an entire ecosystem of support - from the business schools
that train their managers to the banks and public subsidies that finance
their creation and expansion.
Worker-cooperative advocates are building a parallel ecosystem of
this kind all across the country. Cooperative development projects like
the Wellspring Collaborative in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the CERO
cooperative in Boston are creating exciting new crowdfunding mechanisms
to help communities launch democratic enterprises. Organizations
like The Working World and the Shared Capital Cooperative are building
national networks to channel financial resources into the cooperative
economy, creating diversified opportunities in which both institutions
and individuals can invest.
In cities like New York, Madison,
Wisconsin, and Rochester, New York, municipal funding is now being used
to support the work of cooperative developers focusing on creating
worker-owned businesses in low-income communities. There
is no reason why every city and town’s existing infrastructure for
helping small businesses cannot be turned toward democratic
alternatives, and the more this happens, the easier it becomes to make
the case to community stakeholders and policymakers.
A key opportunity here is conversions of existing businesses. As the
boomer generation retires, the future for hundreds of thousands of
small- and medium-sized businesses is unclear. Without a succession
plan, many of these businesses may get absorbed by financialized private
equity or simply cease to exist. If we organize to take advantage of
this historical moment, we can convert many of these to worker-owned
businesses instead.
3. Procurement politics: “buy local” at a bigger scale
Solid local organizing is shifting the purchasing behavior of
place-based nonprofit institutions - or “anchor” institutions - toward
sustainability and economic inclusion. This means big steps toward the
Pluralist Commonwealth can be achieved with relatively small amounts of
activist resources.
Consider the Real Food Challenge: In less than a decade, this network
of student activists has secured pledges to shift more than $60 million
of food purchases at 73 colleges and universities across the country
into more sustainable and just options.
Opportunities exist in every aspect of anchor institution operations.
A student-led study at the University of Michigan found that just a 5
percent shift in procurement to local suppliers would increase local
economic activity by more than $13 million and create more than 450
jobs.
Non-profit hospitals may be particularly open to such demands with new
rules under the Affordable Care Act mandating “community health need
assessments” - reports that can illuminate the role that poverty plays in
poor public-health outcomes and make clear the responsibility of health
care institutions to use their resources to address economic inequality.
And campaigns to alter purchasing can strategically link up with
campaigns to shift investment dollars in the same institutions. For
instance, the Reinvest in Our Power
campaign is mobilizing students to demand not just divestment from
carbon in their schools’ endowment portfolios, but active reinvestment
in community-controlled financial institutions.
“Buying local” may make us feel better about the consequences of our
consumer choices, but when we change the way our public and large
nonprofit institutions like universities and hospitals spend their
money, we’re shifting hundreds of billions, if not upwards of a
trillion, dollars into local economies - and creating a kind of
decentralized planning system in the process.
This is the concept behind the Evergreen Cooperatives, which channel
the purchasing power of Cleveland’s biggest anchors into a network of
green worker cooperatives, creating opportunities for ownership in some
of the city’s hardest-hit communities and communities of color.
As we work to shift the dollars spent by public and nonprofit
institutions into patterns that support and stabilize thriving local
economies, it’s important to remember that we must defend our right to
do so politically. Right-wing state legislatures and large-scale
international trade agreements like TTIP and the TPP aim to remove
barriers to the global movement of capital and undermine local
procurement initiatives.
4. Participatory governance: organize for renewed democracy
At the heart of the Pluralist Commonwealth is the idea of renewed
democracy. We all know that American democracy is severely broken - but
just “getting the money out” of our political system is insufficient.
A compelling alternative is suggested by participatory budgeting,
which allows residents of a community to vote directly on how a portion
of public money is spent. The mechanism, developed initially in Latin
America, has been making substantial progress in the U.S. in recent
years and can be built upon, shifting our political culture away from
spectacles of personality and toward real engagement with the project of
self-government.
Following the lead of city officials in places like Chicago and New
York who embraced participatory budgeting to manage discretionary funds,
smaller cities like Vallejo, California, and Greensboro,
North Carolina, have embarked on citywide participatory budgeting
processes. Santa Fe, New Mexico, is pioneering a participatory budgeting
process tied to a fund for renewable energy investments.
While the amounts of money in each project to date remain small,
participatory budgeting at once normalizes the demand for direct
community control over the allocation of resources and provides a site
in which the muscles of community self-government can be strengthened
and scaled up. In short, it is an organizing process as much as it is
budgeting process. And it’s only through such organizing and development
that we can build toward higher-order processes of truly participatory
planning.
Boston’s trailblazing participatory budgeting process, for instance,
recognizes the key role it can play in developing long-term community
leadership by prioritizing the city’s youth. Boston has placed $1
million of public money under binding, directly democratic control of
Boston residents between the ages of 12 and 25.
And even in cities where municipal officials aren’t ready to embrace
direct participation in budgeting, there are plenty of opportunities for
creative grassroots organizing to expand participatory budgeting. The
Department of Housing and Urban Development has officially endorsed it
as a way to implement required community oversight of money allocated
locally through Community Development Block Grants. In Toronto, for the
past 13 years public housing residents have had direct, binding control
over millions of dollars of annual capital improvement funding.
As we seek to reinvent, reinvigorate, and revitalize American
democracy, we can begin by empowering the communities far too commonly
denied the right to meaningfully participate.
5. Energy democracy: plan it by region
Building democratic ownership at the community level opens up the
possibility for planning. In Boulder, Colorado, citizens felt that their
city’s power supplier - corporate giant Xcel Energy - was not taking the
threat of climate change seriously. Rather than trying to force the
company to comply with regulations, the residents of Boulder decided to
take their utility back. When this municipalization (currently in progress
despite multiple political and legal roadblocks thrown up by the
corporate incumbent) is complete, the city will be able to
democratically manage its own energy sources.
Boulder proves that planning is by no means necessarily undemocratic
or centralized - in fact, one of the reasons I believe changing the
underlying ownership patterns of the economy is so important is that it
begins to unlock possibilities not just for a more equal distribution of
wealth, but for the kinds of decentralized planning we need.
Ultimately, we need to be scaling up beyond the city level to the
regional level if we really want to plan effectively for a new energy
system. Those most affected by the old energy system already realize
this - and in many cases are at the forefront of efforts to imagine what a
just transition looks like at a regional level.
A particularly exciting effort is the one being led in parts of
Appalachia by groups like Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and Mountain
Association for Community Economic Development. Faced with a
recalcitrant state government opposed to implementation of the federal
Clean Power Plan, local activists have been engaging stakeholders on the
ground to develop a clean power plan of their own, from below, with a
particular focus on rebuilding economic opportunity for the workers and
communities that have traditionally depended on the coal industry as one
of the few sources of jobs in the region.
Even without the ability to directly translate this popular planning
process into public policy, such activism, oriented around large-scale
alternative visions, can be a powerful organizing tool as we work toward
a post-carbon future.
6. Stop imperialism, tame growth
I have worked nearly my entire life in
the United States, inside what has been the most powerful capitalist
state in the world. And while bottom-up, grassroots experiments at
increasingly larger levels of scale are key, it is important to remember
why they matter.
Simply put, without dismantling the
engine of growth at the heart of the American economy, we don’t stand a
chance of making the world a sustainable and equitable place for the
human species to thrive. This ultimately means transforming some very
large corporations into public utilities,
preferably at the regional level. Such entities would not be subject
to the Wall Street maxim of grow or die, nor would they drag the U.S.
into support of right-wing dictators willing to allow American
corporations to control a good deal of their development.
Building the Pluralist Commonwealth in
America is, to my mind, an act of anti-imperialism. But recognizing this
deep connection between building a more local and sustainable economy
at home and the well-being of the rest of the world does not absolve us
of responsibility to oppose the government’s efforts to reassert
America’s grasp on global hegemony.
The same good conscience that leads
us to reconstruct the American economic system over decades should also
lead us to oppose the rattling of sabers, the support for the overthrow of inconvenient foreign democracies, and the destruction wrought by American military action overseas.
Gar Alperovitz wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Gar is the former Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland and co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative. His most recent publication is What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution (2013).
by Cat Johnson, Shareable: http://www.shareable.net/blog/how-small-cities-can-get-big-benefits-from-flexible-bikesharing
