A bike-share program is on the horizon for Philadelphia. In the last few months, the city has taken a number of steps to move the initiative forward. After setting aside $3 million in funding for the program, a selection committee—made up of the Mayor’s Office of Transportation & Utilities, the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania Environmental Council—released a Request For a Proposals (RFP) for a strategic business plan, consulting, and cost estimate services. Now, a winner has been announced.
The selection committee received a total of six submissions from urban planning firms across the country, later inviting three finalists to come in for an interview, including Bike Nation, Nelson Nygaard and E3 Think, and the Toole Design Group. And, the Toole Design Group has just been named the winner of the RFP.
Spencer Finch, Director of Sustainable Infrastructure at the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, said the Washington DC-based Toole Design Group submitted the winning proposal because they “brought the experience” and the “financial analysis to do to the work.” RJ Eldridge, Director of Planning at Toole, will lead this project and collaborate with Foursquare Integrated Transportation Planning, a regional transportation planning firm in Rockville, MD.
The Toole Design Group appears to be a logical choice. The firm just completed a manual, “Bike Sharing in The United States: State of the Practice and Guide to Implementation,” for the Federal Highway Administration on all existing bike-sharing programs across the country.
The business plan will explore different options for financing the program from purely private or purely public funding to a “hybrid model” of state and federal funding, along with non-profit and private sponsorship.
The selection committee plans to make a formal announcement later this week and expects the business plan to be completed by this May. The program is scheduled to launch by 2014, and make over 1,000 bikes available at about 100 stations across the city by the following year.
