Bike-share program back on track for downtown Riverhead and Veterans Memorial Park

A bike share program is coming to Riverhead after all.

Riverhead signed onto Suffolk County’s fledgling bike share program in the fall of 2019. The county had partnered with the micromobility company Zagster for the service. Riverhead was the fourth municipality to sign up for the program, which was scheduled to launch in Riverhead last spring.

Then COVID struck and nearly everything unrelated to pandemic management ground to a halt. Then Zagster ended its bike-share operations nationwide. In June, the venture capital company that owned Zagster sold the Boston start-up to an electric scooter developer and manufacturer and Zagster was out of the bike-share business.

Enter PedalShare. The Southampton-based company launched in 2018 with a pilot bike-share program in Southampton Village and was soon operating in other East End hamlets.

After Zagster discontinued its bike-share operations, Suffolk County reached out to PedalShare, said company cofounder Chris Dimon.

In September, PedalShare began operating in the county’s existing locations in the Village of Babylon, the Village of Patchogue and the hamlet of Hampton Bays.

“It was very successful,” Dimon said in an interview today. “In two months, we signed up 500 new users,” he said. It has nearly 1,300 users altogether.

“We had been in talks to try to get Riverhead up and running, but it was in the middle of COVID, so it didn’t move forward. Then Councilman Rothwell contacted us and things progressed,” Dimon said.

Councilman Ken Rothwell, who was appointed by the town board in January to fill former councilwoman Jodi Giglio’s seat, said he had used PedalShare’s bikes in Southampton Village on an outing with his family and it was a good experience.

Dimon explained to Rothwell how the program works and Rothwell got PedalShare on the town board’s work session agenda last week. Dimon appeared via Zoom and presented the program to the board.

PedalShare currently owns 195 rental bicycles, 45 stations and more than 290 bike docks, Dimon told the board.

The company has a simple pricing plan, because the founders — Dimon and partner Patrick O’Donoghue — said other bike-share pricing plans, some of which charge by the minute, are too complicated and confusing. Users can rent bikes for $4 per hour or $35 per day. Annual memberships are $59, which entitle members to unlimited one-hour rides. Time over an hour is charged on a per-hour basis.

Fees are paid and rentals are completed using an app available for free download on the App Store and Google Play.

The app provides users with information about the location’s geography, areas where bicycling is prohibited and other rules of the road.

There is no cost to the town. Revenue for the company is generated by user fees and program sponsorships. The stations require no electric service.

“We think we’re ready to start [in Riverhead] May,” Dimon said today. The town board needs to approve a license agreement with PedalShare.

Dimon told board members the company offers two types of bike stations, one of which can easily be moved from on place to another. Each station is equipped with a number of docks, which control the use of the bicycles.

The idea of a bike-share program is to provide alternative transportation and exercise opportunities for residents. The town hopes to promote a connection between the area around the railroad station and the downtown business district. Bike stations would be placed at the train station and at locations downtown. Another station will be placed at Veterans Memorial Park, where the town has a nine-mile paved, non-motorized trail that is very popular with cyclists.

“People who want to use the trail might not have the ability to transport their own bikes to the park,” Rothwell said. “But with the ability to rent a bike there, a lot more people will take advantage of the trail.”

Councilwoman Catherine Kent agreed. “It would certainly be easier, as Ken stated, to have the bikes there at the park.” Kent said with more people living downtown now, there may be a demand for the bikes for basic transportation purposes.

The other board members also had a favorable reaction to the proposal.

Supervisor Yvette Aguiar asked Rothwell to work with Community Development director Dawn Thomas on choosing locations for the bike stations.

Thomas has been working on the establishment of a transit oriented development district in the area around the railroad station.

The town obtained a $400,000 JumpStart grant from Suffolk County in 2019 to establish bike paths and improve crosswalks downtown. Thomas said today the town asked to apply that grant to the overall plans for connectivity between the railroad station area and downtown, where the town is also currently working on creating a town square, to open up East Main Street to the Peconic Riverfront. Plans for the JumpStart grant funds would best be made in the context of the development of the TOD district and the town square, Thomas said.

“The idea is to create a downtown alternative transportation circuit,” Thomas said. “We’d use the gran money for improvements to create that circuit — crosswalks, lighting, striping and the like,” she said.