This summer, the first POGOH station on Carnegie Mellon’s campus opened outside of TCS Hall on Forbes Avenue. POGOH is a city-wide system of shared bikes, including both standard pedal bikes and e-assist bikes. Users can choose to pay on a per-ride basis or with a yearly membership fee. Bikes are maintained by POGOH and must be returned to a designated POGOH station at the end of every ride.
Anyone who lives in a city knows that transportation is an essential facet of everyday life. There is no way around it: people move. In the past two decades, transportation has been a pressing topic for Pittsburgh, resulting in changes to the bus system, car parking and ride-sharing, electric vehicles, and bicycle infrastructure in the streets.
Bike sharing is one product of a larger social movement in Pittsburgh spearheaded by activists pushing for more efficient, effective, and inexpensive ways to get around. The first official Pittsburgh Bike Plan was released in 1999 and its addendum, the Bike (+) Plan, was published in 2020. The city’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure (DOMI), created in 2017, encompasses non-bike transit options such as Spin Scooters and a Zipcar partnership, as well as the POGOH bike sharing project, in its transportation initiative.
POGOH is run by a non-profit organization called Bike Share Pittsburgh, founded in 2012. Bike Share Pittsburgh initially launched its Healthy Ride program in 2015, reaching 106 bike-share stations. Just last year, Bike Share Pittsburgh rebranded their bike sharing program as POGOH, starting with 38 stations around Pittsburgh, over 350 bikes, and a renewed goal of providing more e-assist bikes to the community. According to Erin Potts, POGOH’s Director of Marketing & Community Outreach, the long-term goal of the program is “to be available to everyone in every neighborhood; a regional, ubiquitous network of bike-share and safe cycling infrastructure is essential to a sustainable future for our city.”
That goal is being put into practice through POGOH’s Mobility Justice Membership, offering unlimited 30-minute rides to recipients of government assistance programs, including SNAP, LIHEAP, Medicare, and Medicaid, for $10 a year. Users do not need a smartphone to unlock POGOH bikes — they can pay for rides in advance in cash. The addition of more e-bikes to POGOH stations makes the bike-share system even more accessible. Motor-powered bikes are easier to take up hills and allow almost everyone who can walk to use the bikes.
“We don’t want cost to be a reason why someone can’t use bike-share,” Potts said. “We want everyone to be able to enjoy POGOH, and to get around Pittsburgh without the need to use a car.” The e-bike initiative “makes tackling the many hills of Pittsburgh [possible] without even breaking a sweat. E-bikes break down barriers to bicycling in our city.”
The new POGOH station on Carnegie Mellon’s campus increases the transit options available for the campus community. However, it is just the first step in creating a comprehensive bike-share system that benefits POGOH, students, and administration.
Currently, people in the Carnegie Mellon community have to pay to ride POGOH bikes just like everyone else. However, POGOH has a history of partnering with colleges, such as the University of Pittsburgh, in order to give all members of the community free access to POGOH bikes with their ID cards.
Karen Brooks, Carnegie Mellon’s Bike Consultant, is one person currently advocating for this type of partnership. According to her, when the University of Pittsburgh partnered with POGOH, it ended up paying less to Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) in bus fare because POGOH bike trips were replacing student bus trips. Brooks said a POGOH-CMU partnership has been proposed to the administration but there has not been support for it — one of the obstacles facing this partnership is the lack of POGOH stations in Squirrel Hill, where many students live.
“CMU is kind of a gap in the network,” Brooks pointed out. POGOH wants administrators to put bike stations in Squirrel Hill before they put one on campus, she explained, while the university wants POGOH to put stations on campus before building anything in Squirrel Hill. Brooks described this discussion as “chicken and egg. I think we should just do it because it makes so much sense.”
Despite the opportunity, several common problems arise when students use bicycles as their main form of transportation. For one, there are not always convenient places to store bikes in dorms or apartment buildings. Students may also struggle to find the time or the money to maintain a bike.
“We get a lot of bikes that end up abandoned because people don’t have time to deal with it when they leave,” Brooks said. “POGOH solves all that. You don’t have to store it, you don’t have to maintain it, you don’t have to worry about returning it. Just use it as needed.”
The push for more involvement with POGOH is coming from students as well as staff. Anthony Cheng, Vice President of Campus Affairs for the Graduate Student Association (GSA), explained that “the GSA would like to continue to advocate for more locations on campus.” However, as a member of the Parking and Transportation Advisory Committee, he is not focused solely on bike sharing.
Cheng “would like to see more bus service to areas where students live, particularly in Squirrel Hill, because during times of rush hour those buses are so full,” he said. Not only standard PRT buses, but also the possibility of electric buses, something the GSA has spoken about with the CEO of PRT. Cheng also said that the GSA has funding approved for putting up more covered bike racks around campus, and encouraged students to reach out to the GSA with location suggestions for new bike racks.
Bike infrastructure and advocacy already exists at Carnegie Mellon. In terms of bike storage, Cheng emphasized that “there are actually a lot of bike racks on campus that are underused because they’re hidden away … but just require an additional one minute walk.” He encourages students to “look for the resources that CMU already provides.”
Brooks explained that improvements to Frew Street in recent years have made a dramatic difference. She said “that was honestly one of the most dangerous streets around campus,” but now it is one-way for cars and there is a separate bike lane, which makes the street much safer for cyclists.
For people wanting to encourage more improvements in biking conditions at Carnegie Mellon, Brooks suggested that people join the Bike Advisory Committee, an organization of students and faculty who “talk about bike issues — which tend to go hand in hand with pedestrian issues — to advocate within CMU administration for things like POGOH and bike sales.” The committee started about 10 years ago and became less active in the midst of COVID-19, but will be up and running again this year.
Outside of Carnegie Mellon, the organization BikePGH is always looking for support. BikePGH hosts events educating the public about biking and does advocacy work pushing for bikeable and walkable streets around the city.
The POGOH bike-share system coming to Carnegie Mellon is the result of efforts from multiple organizations collectively working toward safer city streets and more transit options for the citizens of Pittsburgh, and POGOH is nowhere near done with their initiative.
“We need to reach more communities in need of transportation options, and continue to build a bike friendly city where taking a bike is seen as mainstream and not for the few,” Potts said. She remained hopeful and energized about the project, explaining that “the way that we’ve seen POGOH’s ridership grow in the college community demonstrates that the culture around transportation in cities is changing.”
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