Fixing Old Bikes for a New Guerrilla Bike Share System

Montclair’s grassroots bike share system aims to fill the gap in short-trip transportation.

While towns and cities across the United States are adopting shared micromobility as a viable transportation option, many towns and cities have yet to approach SMM as a reality for them. Montclair, New Jersey, a commuter town of New York City, is one such town. In response to this lack of access, one resident is taking matters into their own hands with the launch of the Montclair Guerrilla Bike Share Program. The initiative, which operates outside the formal infrastructure of a traditional bike share program, aims to provide residents with a means to get around without a car.

The program’s creator wants to avoid being identified but goes by Andy and is a Montclair resident. Andy shared that the idea for this program came to him after a conversation with a coworker. Andy had recently started fixing up abandoned bikes he found on the streets around town and was running out of space in his garage to store them. His coworker expressed how convenient it’d be to have a bike they could ride to the bus stop and continue their commute and have a bike waiting for them for the ride home. This coworker became the first rider and the catalyst for the Montclair Guerrilla Bike Share Program.

Andy shared the same sentiment when commuting on the train to New York City for work.

“When I come back late, a five-minute bike ride is a lot more appealing than a 12- to 15-minute walk,” says Andy. “I was like, ‘Oh, it’d be cool to have a bike sitting there ready for me anytime I wanted it.’ That might encourage me to use the train more often or make that choice a little easier.“

A phone number and email address are all that’s needed to sign up. The bikes have trackers to identify where the bike was picked up and where it traveled within half a block. Andy uses this information to determine where new bikes need to be placed or where bikes should be moved for greater usage. This tracking capability is new to the program, being added once it became clear that bikes by the commuter stops were not being utilized at the frequency Andy had expected.

“The difficulty of the program in general is often like they’ll start in a centralized location and end up in places where they wouldn’t likely get picked up,” he says. “So a big part of the work is rounding them up and bringing them back to a location where they’re a little bit more convenient for people who might want to use them.”

When Andy launched this program last fall, he hoped to encourage people to take the bikes to the commuter trains. 

“Then I realized it was not working, and nobody was using it. So, I tried something else,” Andy says. “It’s evolved to be where people need the bikes.”

High school and college-aged students have found the program the most useful, according to Andy, with high usage around Montclair State University, New Jersey’s second-largest university. He often sees students using the bikes to travel to and from the school’s residence halls.

Andy voiced that a problem he’s seen with this attempt at bike share is how to make it a reliable source of transportation and not a novelty.

“The intention was that someone would take it for a short ride, similar to what the more official city bike shares do where you have a very limited amount of time,” he says. “But I think what’s showing up is that for people to use them and feel like it’s a useful thing to have, they keep them for long periods of time, like weeks or even a couple of months at a time. It’s that reliability factor that I think is something that needs to be figured out. That’s what I’m still working on.”

Montclair has a clear need for convenient transportation options for students and commuters making short trips — The Montclair Guerrilla Bike Share Program is working to be part of the solution.