Photograph by Andrew Doench
On a late summer Sunday afternoon, Jennifer Jacobson and her husband drive downtown from their home in Newtown, park at Montgomery Inn on Riverside Drive, stroll over to the Red Bike station, and select an electric-assist bike for Jennifer, while her husband unloads his personal e-bike from the car. They set off to cruise along the riverfront and The Banks and across the Roebling Suspension Bridge, testing how the bike feels with her new knee, which had been implanted just a few weeks earlier.
“I’m trying it out just to get my range of motion and get comfortable on an e-bike,” Jacobson tells me. “We’re riding around because the weather is so nice.”
Later that afternoon, Ron Williams emerges from his apartment in northern Over-the-Rhine, uses the Red Bike app to choose an e-bike from the docking station near Findlay Market, and sets off to visit a friend, opting to bike instead of walk. “Anything I need to do, I’ll just jump on one of these and go,” he says.
Jacobson and Williams represent the primary users of Cincinnati’s bike-sharing system: people who use it once or twice purely for recreation and those who use it frequently to get where they need to go. As Red Bike’s management, supporters, and sponsors ponder the program’s future in the wake of a financial crisis and a four-month shutdown, they’ll look for ways to increase ridership among both types of users and find new ways to weave bike sharing into Cincinnati’s larger transit picture.
Started with fanfare 10 years ago, Red Bike, like bike-sharing systems around the U.S., is facing a reckoning. What began as a visible sign of a city striving to be more bike-friendly, less car-centric, and more attractive to young professionals now struggles with growing pains sparked by the loss of its major sponsor, along with questions about its larger role in the region’s transportation network. Is Red Bike a fun way to spend a couple of hours tooling around OTR or downtown with friends, or is it a key piece of an urban transit system? Both? Neither? Those are the questions its leadership and supporters are pondering after the pause in service and a financial reprieve funded partly by City Hall.
“Riding bikes is joyful, right?” says Doug McClintock, Red Bike’s executive director. “It’s all about fun and the excitement of the wind in your hair. We all get that feeling. But can we use this as a lever to help people make their lives easier and move the way they want to through their community and between communities?”
McClintock has been with the program from the beginning. He was the second employee hired in August 2014 after Jason Barron, who launched the service the following month and served as its director until 2022, when he was named director of Cincinnati Parks. McClintock was laboring in the automobile industry in Alabama when he heard of the opportunity in Cincinnati, a place he was familiar with, and was hired. “I took a bus, brought a couple bags, showed up at a station installation, and started picking up tools and doing stuff,” he says.
He became Red Bike’s operations manager, a key maintenance and troubleshooting role that he held for eight years, until he was promoted to the lead role in August 2022. Barely a year into his tenure, McClintock was faced with the most serious existential crisis in the program’s 10-year history: UC Health ended its sponsorship, which had sustained the bike program from the beginning. Losing the annual $250,000 sponsorship meant that the program dropped a quarter of its budget overnight. That was like the city of Cincinnati taking a $300 million hit to its annual budget or Procter & Gamble losing Walmart and Kroger as customers.
When asked why UC Health ended its 10-year sponsorship, spokesperson Heather Chura-Smith replied with a statement that said, in part, “We remain committed to continuing our support of community organizations. UC Health was proud to support Red Bike throughout our entire multi-year contract that ended last year.” She did not comment directly on a report that UC Health experienced large operating losses between July 2021 and the end of 2023.
In December 2023, McClintock announced that Red Bike service would suspend its operations for a few months, catch its breath, and make “significant staff reductions,” but keep the bikes and stations maintained and plan to resume service in the spring. “This is not where Red Bike imagined operations would be as the system enters the 10th year of service,” he said when announcing the suspension.
Bike service resumed in May thanks to temporary sponsorships from a group of stakeholders that included the city of Cincinnati, Greater Cincinnati Foundation, Haile Foundation, Interact for Health, Metro/SORTA, and Duke Energy. They provided enough money to keep the system operating until April 2025 and enough time to figure out what Red Bike wants to be and should be and how to sustain it in the future. The organization hired a consultant with funding from Interact for Health to examine the program’s design and compare it to other not-for-profit programs around the country.
“That essentially gave us some breathing room,” says Cincinnati City Councilmember Mark Jeffreys, a committed bicyclist and Red Bike’s biggest champion at City Hall.
Photograph by Andrew Doench
145,000
Total Red Bikes rides in 2023
38%
Increase over its second best ridership year (2019)
10
Red Bike celebrated its 10th anniversary in September
4
Number of months Red Bike shut down (January-April)
$250,000
Amount of UC Health’s annual sponsorship that ended in 2023
April 2025
When emergency funding runs out
Red Bike shut down just as the program was coming off of its biggest year ever in terms of ridership. The service provided more than 145,000 rides in 2023, 43 percent more than it did the year before and 38 percent more than its next biggest year, 2019. It’s a perfect illustration of the difficult economics of nonprofit bike sharing programs.
Red Bike’s steep increase in ridership was almost entirely due to its “Go” program, a membership for people who receive food assistance through SNAP benefits, receive energy assistance, or are covered by Medicaid. For those eligible, a monthly pass is $5 for unlimited rides. The program was launched in 2019 but really got rolling in 2023 with new stations in Evanston and Walnut Hills and with a grant-funded awareness and marketing campaign. “It was a massive increase and we’re really, really proud of that, because the bulk of that ridership came from folks who struggle with transportation equity,” says McClintock.
Many Go passholders use Red Bike for daily transit. “A large number of folks are in our equity program because they may not have a car,” he says. “They may not have access to other forms of transit. And we’re a very affordable option.”
Ron Williams is one of those users. His Medicaid benefits make him eligible for the pass, and he uses it often. “I ride them everywhere,” he says at the Findlay Market station. “I ride up to Walnut Hills and sometimes Avondale.” He’s even used the bikes to deliver for DoorDash, ranging as far as Ft. Thomas on the electric-assisted two-wheeler.
The program has been popular, and on a recent morning three people were waiting outside McClintock’s downtown office to buy Go passes when he opened for the day. But $5 monthly passes, while a benefit to those in need of transportation, don’t really pay the bills. For that matter, neither do the full-fare riders, who now pay $12 for two hours.
Photograph courtesy Red Bike
Only about a third of the system’s revenue comes from its fares. Most of the rest comes from sponsorships. That’s essentially the same experience for most nonprofit bike share programs around the U.S.
“Many systems are reaching record-breaking ridership at the same time they’re facing sustainable funding struggles,” says Laura Mallonee, membership and engagement director with the North American Bikeshare and Scootershare Association (NABSA). Or, as McClintock says, “Nobody’s solving it on the farebox alone.”
Red Bike had its first significant price increase in six years at the beginning of 2024. Two-hour passes went to $12, monthly passes to $30, and annual passes to $150. The Go pass stayed at $5 a month.
“Bike share is, by its nature, a fragile thing to fund,” says McClintock. “We want to see people ride bikes and improve their lives, but that has to be balanced with the funding that allows us to operate. We have to increase full-fare revenue, because those people help fund the entire operation. It’s a very difficult balancing act.”
Outside funding—through sponsorships, subsidies, or grants—is a common practice in bike share programs. Mallonee argues for public funding of the service as an essential element of city transportation. “While user fees, sponsorship revenue, and advertising can support some costs, they aren’t enough,” she says. “More support is needed to expand shared micromobility and its benefits.”
The city of Cincinnati pitched in $197,000 to help fund Red Bike through next year, and Jeffreys says some public funding makes sense as the system figures out how to become sustainable for the long term. Details remain up in the air, but could mean helping to fund equipment and infrastructure rather than daily operations. “There is a role for the city of Cincinnati,” he says. “What that is, I think, needs to take shape. It might be more on the capital side.”
Capital expenses are significant, as Red Bike maintains hundreds of bikes and 70 docking stations exposed to the elements year-round. The system has expanded from 30 stations, but its biggest transformation came in the form of e-bikes. About 70 percent of its bikes and about 90 percent of its rides are now powered in part by a battery-powered motor attached to the rear wheel, which makes riding much easier, faster, and more enjoyable.
The upgrade, however, came with its own issues, namely the maintenance required to keep the e-bikes in working condition. They’ve driven up operating costs, as the batteries need to be swapped out every two or three days and the depleted batteries re turned to headquarters to be charged, then cycled back out to the field again. “It’s a massive man-hour lift,” says McClintock.
But e-bikes are the future, and Red Bike’s entire fleet could go battery-powered at some point, he says, adding that he already has a grant in hand to fund electric replacements for the remaining classic two-wheelers.
Red Bike’s growing pains aren’t unique. Similar programs in other U.S. cities have faced financial problems and questions about their purpose and future. In June, Houston shut down its bike share program after 12 years, and the city, which owns the bikes, began selling them in an online auction. The shutdown came after the program had suspended operations two years earlier in order to save money, regroup, and plan for its future.
Over 10 years, Houston’s program had grown from three to 153 stations, with growth largely in low-income neighborhoods. “Unfortunately, revenue has not kept pace with the cost of operational support to maintain a larger bike share network,” a program spokesperson said at the time.
Minneapolis, a pioneer in bike-sharing, ended its Nice Ride program in 2023 after losing a key sponsor. The program was quickly replaced, though, when the city contracted with three for-profit operators, including the scooter vendor Lime.
The bike share program in Columbus, CoGo, has been supported with a total of $1.6 million in funding from the city over the last year as it seeks a long-term corporate sponsor. The Columbus program is managed by San Francisco-based mobility provider Lyft.
One bright spot is in Austin, Texas, which is planning to triple the size of its bike share program thanks in large part to an $11.3 million federal grant. The city plans to replace and upgrade its 80 bike stations, 1,000 docks, and 800 bicycles.
The consultant hired to examine Cincinnati’s program found it to be in line with other cities’ not-for-profit systems and said it was one of the more efficiently operated systems of those it was compared to. “From an operational standpoint, Red Bike is very competitive compared to these other places, so the expenses are not out of whack and the revenue is not out of whack,” says Jeffreys.
“We’re operating well above our capacity, given what we spend,” McClintock says. “We’ve run a very tight and efficient system.”
Red Bike stakeholders will likely look at the two main ridership demographics to see if more revenue can be earned from them. That could mean finding ways to encourage tourists and others who ride for fun and leisure and typically pay the full $12 fare to ride more often.
The key to Red Bike’s sustainable future may lie with Metro, the region’s bus system. Locating more Red Bike stations near Metro transit centers and bus stops could increase ridership by giving bus riders an alternative to walking or driving those last few blocks from the stop to home or work. “There are opportunities to integrate it as a ‘last mile’ solution for Metro,” Jeffreys says. “This system has not been designed for that, but there are ways you could design it to more fully integrate public transit with Red Bike usage.”
Jeffreys suggests studying such a design with a pilot project, perhaps in Northside, where Metro operates a transit hub, or in Clifton, another alternate-transportation-friendly neighborhood with lots of bus routes passing through. That could include some sort of all-inclusive fare or pass that allows passholders to ride Metro buses and Red Bikes. Metro, which is supported in part by a countywide sales tax, could even be a permanent sponsor of the bike share program. “You can imagine it being called Metro Bikes or Go Metro Bikes,” Jeffreys says.
In 2020, Hamilton County voters approved raising the county sales tax (and reducing the city of Cincinnati’s earnings tax) for a period of 25 years, producing more than $100 million a year in additional funding for Metro operations. Metro has earmarked that money for upgrading the bus system in terms of new and expanded routes, new bus rapid transit corridors, new “last mile” transit options, and other projects.
Linking bike share programs with public transit is currently being tried in a few cities. Pittsburgh has combined its bike share and bus/light rail system fares into a single account and digital app, while in Tucson, Arizona, holders of a reduced fare bus pass are eligible for a $5 annual bike share membership.
Consultant Hugh Ralston updated the board of Metro parent SORTA on results to date of its study in September, and Metro’s chief of staff, Andy Aiello, is part of a team studying the system along with Ralston, Jeffreys, Cincinnati Regional Chamber Vice President Pete Metz, and John Yung of the Haile Foundation. Decisions on the structure and funding of Red Bike 2.0 will be made in the next few months.
Red Bike appears to everyone involved to be a reliable network, and paying for and unlocking the bikes is pretty easy. I rode for the first time not for fun or essential transportation but for professional research. I downloaded the Red Bike app after fumbling with it for a few minutes (my problem) and used it to unlock a bike.
I chose an e-bike, designated with a lightning bolt on the frame, at the Findlay Market station and set off toward The Banks. As a bicyclist who rides a 16-speed, drop-handled, Japanese road bike, I was a little skeptical of the heavy Red Bike with a basket in the front. They’re a little clunky, but the electric assist accelerated quickly, even up hills. The motor had plenty of charge (an indicator on the handlebar shows how much), and I rode downtown, around streets at The Banks, over the Suspension Bridge into Covington, then to Newport and back to Findlay Market. The seat is adjustable, and I used the basket to hold my notebook and phone.
Whatever Red Bike’s future looks like, I can report that my “work ride” turned out to be a lot of fun. And my own knees felt just fine.
Facebook Comments