By Erik Noonan
A new report from the Great Plains Institute asks a question the Twin Cities bikeshare conversation has mostly avoided: Who is this actually for?
The Twin Cities Bikeshare Equity Study — 40 pages, funded through the MN Pollution Control Agency’s Local Climate Action Grant program — traces the full history of shared bikes in our region and then looks hard at the gap between what bikeshare can do and who it currently serves. It interviewed a dozen local transportation leaders and advocates, surveyed equity-focused programs across North America, and came back with a practical toolkit for closing that gap.
BikeMN Executive Director Michael Wojcik was one of those interviewed:
“If you build a wonderful road that’s safe 95 percent of the way, most people won’t use it. But as soon as you hit 100 percent, almost everybody will use it. So it can’t just be about mobility. It has to be the actual strategy of getting people from point A to point B.”
That’s it. That’s the whole argument. Not whether bikeshare is good — the evidence for that is strong and growing — but whether the system is complete enough to actually work for everyone. And right now, even in the Twin Cities, it isn’t.
At least not yet.
The honest history
The Twin Cities have been doing this longer than most places. The Yellow Bike Coalition put shared bikes on Saint Paul streets in the 1990s. Nice Ride Minnesota launched a serious station-based system in 2010 and spent over a decade building equity programs into it — discount memberships for SNAP recipients, loaner bikes in underserved neighborhoods paired with helmets and group rides and bike shop vouchers, a $5 annual pass for Transit Assistance Program participants. Those programs worked because they were built with intention, not bolted on after the fact.
Then Blue Cross pulled its main funding right as the infrastructure aged out, resulting in Nice Ride winding down in 2023. Now Lime and Spin operate dockless systems under contract with Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and both cities built equity requirements into those agreements — fleet deployment minimums in concentrated poverty areas, automatic ride discounts in equity zones, required income-qualified access programs.
That’s real. And almost everyone interviewed in the report says the current moment is still worse than what Nice Ride was.
“So many people miss Nice Ride,” said Carly Ellefsen of Our Streets Minneapolis. “The dockless system is incredibly expensive, [there are] ADA issues, no regional coordination, having to use an app.”
Russ Stark, former chief resilience officer for Saint Paul, named the structural problem: “To a large degree, as cities, we’re sort of at the mercy of what [private providers] are willing to provide and at the price point that they’re willing to provide it. What we’ve seen, especially in recent years, is the prices have gone way up.”
Dillon Fried at the City of Minneapolis noted that participation in the current income-qualified programs sits well below what Nice Ride for All used to see. “Nice Ride just wanted to get as many people riding as they could. But because of the financial outlook for a private company versus a nonprofit operator, it’s just different.”
Who the system isn’t reaching
The core ridership of bikeshare nationally is still predominantly young, white, and male. The report doesn’t treat this as a fixed feature of the technology — it traces the specific reasons.
Women account for only about 38 percent of bikeshare trips. Poor lighting, lack of protected infrastructure, and real threats of harassment keep them off shared bikes at higher rates. Most bikeshare systems also don’t accommodate the way a lot of women actually travel — with kids, groceries, multiple stops — because the bikes lack cargo capacity or child seats. This is something the Minnesota Cargo Bike Library has been quietly proving the inverse of: put people on an e-cargo bike for a week, with actual orientation and support, and the barriers that seemed fixed start to look more like design choices. The library is now expanding from two locations to four in 2026 thanks to a $50,000 grant from the Minneapolis Foundation — growing precisely because people who borrow the bikes tend to show up differently on the other side of the week.
On race, the Minneapolis data in the report is hard to look past: between 2009 and 2015, nearly half of all bicycle citations and arrests in the city went to Black riders, who were about 18 percent of the population. Fear of police profiling is a documented barrier to bicycling for Black and Latino riders — one that no discount program fixes. Wojcik has been making this argument at the Legislature too, pushing for jaywalking decriminalization not as a technicality but as a basic precondition for equitable access to public space. The bikeshare equity findings and the jaywalking fight are the same argument dressed differently.
Juan Luis Rivera-Reyes of The Alliance named the cost problem directly: people are getting pushed out of transit-friendly areas into suburbs where there’s no public transportation and they’re having to buy cars. Bikeshare doesn’t fix displacement. But a system that’s expensive, app-dependent, summer-only, and concentrated in wealthier neighborhoods makes it worse.
Which is Wojcik’s point, again: 95 percent isn’t 100. The gaps are where people fall out.
What’s working elsewhere
The most useful part of the report is the 25 pages of strategies from cities that have built equity in from the start — not as a feature of the system, but as the reason the system exists.
E-bikes reach people acoustic bikes don’t. When Madison went all-electric, ridership jumped 64 percent and a third of riders said they drove their cars less. In Philadelphia, e-bike ridership grew faster in disadvantaged neighborhoods than anywhere else. In New York City, over 60 percent of Citi Bike users after the e-bike rollout identified as people from underrepresented groups. Older adults, people with physical limitations, people covering longer distances on flat-tire-prone pavement — e-bikes work for them. This connects directly to what the 2026 MnDOT youth e-bike study found when it looked at youth specifically: the data doesn’t support sweeping restrictions on e-bikes, it supports better design of when and where they’re deployed. Same logic applies to shared systems.
Payment access is a real barrier with real fixes. In Detroit, MoGo added cash payment through kiosks citywide after finding nearly a third of metro Detroit adults were unbanked — and about 75 percent of early income-qualified pass recipients paid cash. Portland built a “Transportation Wallet” that gives low-income residents pre-loaded funds usable across bikeshare, transit, and rideshare. Boston ran a billboard campaign advertising its $5 annual bikeshare pass and saw applications jump 147 percent. Bikeshare being available as an option can still mean it is effectively inaccessible through design, cost, or public misunderstanding.
Transit integration determines whether any of this scales. Three-quarters of bikeshare users nationally use it to connect to transit. Co-located stations, shared fare integration, and showing up in the same trip-planning apps as buses and light rail — these aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re the difference between a bikeshare system that functions as a last-mile tool and one that stays a recreational amenity. This is the same infrastructure completion argument Wojcik makes about safe routes: as covered in the Safe Systems piece, meaningful bike infrastructure almost never works as a standalone project. It works when it connects to something.
Community engagement that’s actually co-design. The Nice Ride Neighborhood Program worked — University of Minnesota researchers documented a genuine shift in how participants thought about cycling, from “not for me” to something for everyone — because it wasn’t just about putting bikes in neighborhoods. It was about group rides, relationships, orange bikes that made you feel like you were part of something when you saw another one. The Minnesota Cargo Bike Library is doing the same thing right now, with in-person orientations and real follow-through. The report is clear that programs designed with communities outperform programs designed for them, every time.
The public sector shift
Wojcik’s “95 percent” point isn’t just an observation about infrastructure. It’s a claim about who bears the cost of the gap.
“There really needs to be a shift in thinking to consider bikeshare as public transportation rather than just something that helps with recreational rides and tourism,” said Dillon Fried. “It can be much more integrated as part of our transit system if there is a public sector investment and involvement with the operation.”
Russ Stark: “Cities need to figure out how to work together to get public resources invested in these systems if we want them to be a public good. Doesn’t mean they have to be publicly operated or even owned, but public resources will be required to make it accessible and affordable for people.”
As long as shared mobility is treated as a private business delivering a private product, cities will stay at the mercy of pricing decisions made somewhere else. Stark put it plainly: prices have gone way up. The systems that work — the ones the report spends 25 pages documenting — are the ones where public agencies set real expectations, put real resources in, and treated the outcome as something they were responsible for.
That’s the argument BikeMN has been making across multiple fronts this session. On jaywalking, on e-bike regulation, on safe systems standards — the thread is the same. You don’t get equitable access through good intentions and available options. You get it through complete systems, held to a real standard, with public accountability behind them.
What to do with this
If you’re talking to neighbors or local leaders about shared mobility, here’s what the report actually arms you with:
Ask what’s in the contract. Both Minneapolis and Saint Paul have fleet deployment minimums, automatic equity-zone discounts, and required income-qualified programs written into their vendor agreements. If your community is negotiating or renewing a bikeshare or scootershare contract, these templates exist. Ask what the measurable standards are and how compliance is tracked.
Make the case for e-bikes. The data across Philadelphia, New York, and Madison is consistent. A pedal-only system will keep serving a narrow demographic. E-bikes are where the ridership growth and the equity growth have shown up together.
Connect it to transit. Where are the stations relative to bus routes and rail stops? Does bikeshare show up in the same trip-planning tools as Metro Transit? Physical and digital integration aren’t technical details — they determine whether the system works as transportation or just as recreation.
Point to what’s already happening here. The Minnesota Cargo Bike Library is a live proof of concept for the “free week-long loan plus real orientation plus community follow-through” model the report identifies as effective. It’s BikeMN-supported, it’s expanding, and it’s generating user data on car trip replacement across different parts of the state. It’s worth knowing about and worth pointing to.
Push for public investment. The report is explicit: private operators alone won’t close the gap. The communities with the most equitable bikeshare systems are the ones that treated it as infrastructure and put public money behind it. That argument is available to make in any city council meeting, any county board, any conversation with a state legislator.
Sections III and IV are where the local voices and the strategy toolkit live. It’s 40 pages and worth the time.
Minnesota is a national leader in forward-thinking transportation policy — and that didn’t happen by chance. For over 17 years, BikeMN has been at the table, fight after fight, shaping a future where biking, walking, and rolling is safe, accessible, and valued. That work is funded by members like you. Join as a sustaining supporter today at bikemn.org/join — $5 or $10 a month helps ensure Minnesota stays ahead. We all move forward together.