After several attempts at a relaunch, Salem’s bike-sharing program is calling it quits.
Ride Salem, the nonprofit organization that made bikes available to rent in the city’s center, has ceased operating due to theft and vandalism a little over three years after the service first began.
Evan Osborne, Ride Salem’s co-founder, said the decision follows a tumultuous two years where the nonprofit relaunched its services once after its original vendor shut down during Covid.
Launched in June 2019, the program was intended to give Salemites an easy way to get around the city’s center, allowing people to rent a bike through an app on their phone. Bikes were rentable from and returnable to stations at high-traffic locations including the Cherriots transit center downtown, Riverfront Park and the Amtrak station just outside downtown.
Osborne said for about nine months, the service ran well. But when the pandemic hit, Zagster, the company that supplied the bikes, closed down. It ceased operations in June 2020, and Ride Salem had to scramble to buy the bikes and other equipment from the company.
“We had enough money in the bank to purchase the assets from Zagster … but it took a pretty big chunk of change to do so,” Osborne said.
The service relaunched in July 2021 with a new vendor, Koloni. That month, the nonprofit saw 2,000 individual bike rides, and had 33 bikes in service at its peak.
“They were going like hotcakes, the bikes, especially along Riverfront,” Osborne said.
But ridership began to trickle down, and more bikes were coming back damaged, or not at all.
“We saw an exponential amount of theft and vandalism post-Covid relaunch,” he said.
In May 2022, Ride Salem relaunched with another set of bikes.
“Within two weeks all those bikes were gone,” Osborne said.
The organization retrieved one and learned how they were being stolen, with thieves using blowtorches or hacksaws to bypass the proprietary mechanism that made the bikes only work when rented with the app. From there, he said, thieves could wheel the bike far enough away to strip it for parts to be sold.
The nonprofit faced other challenges with fundraising and maintaining a board as well, he said.
“Those extra hands to help with the operations, extra schmoozing within the community to drum up fundraising dollars as supplemental income that we need was missing, and we were not able to recruit replacement board members to fill those seats,” he said.
Replacing all the bikes another time would cost about $50,000, Osborne said. After the latest round of thefts, he decided it was time to wind down operations.
“That was just kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said.
Salem city councilors in September 2020 voted for an agreement with Ride Salem allowing them to operate the bike share racks on city property and waived all fees for the first year of operation. Aside from that, the nonprofit operated independently from the city and never received city funds, according to Osborne and city spokeswoman Nicole Miller.
Osborne said absent a last minute donor or other miracle, he’s planning to ask the organization’s board to shut down Ride Salem and begin the process of removing the bike stations in mid to late September.
He said he doesn’t fault the city for the program shutting down, saying he knows police had bigger fish to fry during the pandemic than responding to bicycle theft.
“I really can’t place any blame on anyone,” he said.
Despite the setbacks, he’s glad he tried to make bike sharing happen in Salem.
“It never feels good to call it quits, but I will not regret my efforts,” he said, noting that the effort had introduced people to the idea of bike sharing. “It’s been a fantastic journey knowing I contributed to something that’s for the greater good and I truly see Ride Salem as something that’s been a trailblazer to the conversation of micro-mobility in Salem.”
Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
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Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers city news, education, nonprofits and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for a decade. Outside of work, she’s a skater and board member with Salem’s Cherry City Roller Derby and can often be found with her nose buried in a book.
