Durham Bull E-Bike Pilot: project management

If you hand someone an e-bike, do they actually stop driving? The City of Durham decided to find out, and my team at UNC got to be the people who answered.

The Bull E-Bike Pilot came out of a $1 million Bloomberg Mayors Challenge grant Durham won in 2018 to cut down on people driving downtown alone. What made it unusual is who it went after. Instead of recruiting the cyclists who would have shown up anyway, the city aimed at downtown hospitality workers, the restaurant and brewery and hotel staff whose shifts end after the buses stop. Preference went to applicants who were non-white, not cis men, over 45, non-English speaking, lower income, and transportation-disadvantaged. 322 people applied and 61 got bikes, across seven cohorts between August and November of 2022. Each one came with a helmet fitted to the person’s actual head, a lock, and somewhere to take the bike when it broke. Of the people who rode, 74% were non-white, the median household income was $40,000, and 40% were working two or more jobs.

The city contracted our second-year master’s cohort at UNC’s Department of City and Regional Planning to evaluate the whole thing, and I ran that engagement as project manager. Our half was the evidence: aggregating the anonymized trip data coming out of OpenPATH, the tracking app NREL built for the pilot, measuring it against the program’s key performance indicators, sitting down for one-on-one exit interviews with participants as each cohort finished, and writing the final report of findings and recommendations that went back to the city.

The numbers held up. Participants logged more than 1,100 confirmed e-bike trips, over a third of every trip they took during the pilot, and rode 2,933 miles. More than half of those trips (54.6%) were commutes. Most importantly for a program built to reduce drive-alone travel: 38.1% of e-bike trips replaced a trip someone would otherwise have driven alone, which worked out to 1,099 miles of solo car travel that simply didn’t happen. The qualitative side told the part the app couldn’t. People without reliable access to a car changed their travel the most, and one participant did the math on her own gas bill and figured she’d saved $150 to $200 in a month.

The program went on to win the Association for Commuter Transportation’s Outstanding Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Award and an Equity in Cleantech Innovation Award in 2023, plus Special Recognition at the Governor’s Awards for High-Impact Research. Durham published an implementation guide so other cities could copy it, and the evaluation we wrote is a chunk of why there was anything worth copying.

What stuck with me is how much of the result came from decisions made long before any data existed. The pilot worked because someone chose to recruit line cooks instead of commuters who already owned Stravas, and because the city was willing to be measured honestly on whether that worked. My job was to make sure the answer was trustworthy either way.