Indego is seeing an ‘unprecedented’ spike in vandalism

Philadelphia’s bike share system, Indego, is suffering a wave of vandalism and theft so intense that they have had to remove five stations.

“Since July, we have had unprecedented level of vandalism to our stations,” said Nate Bowman-Johnston, Indego’s general manager. “It’s just a massive scale that we’re dealing with at this point.”

Thieves have been physically breaking bikes out of the docking stations where they are locked up waiting for paying users. In some cases, the damage to Indego’s infrastructure rendered entire stations inoperable.

Stations have been removed at 16th and Wolf Streets, Fourth Street and Oregon Avenue, and 21st Street and Washington Avenue.

“There are a couple other stations [affected], but South Philly’s been the epicenter of the activity,” Bowman-Johnston said. There are also some stations where only one or a handful of docks have been affected.

Indego is working with law enforcement on the issue. While there have been no arrests, Bowman-Johnston says there are several active investigations.

He said Indego is waiting on parts and plans to reinstall all of the lost stations in the next two months. “The goal is to reinstall every station,” he said.

Stations outfitted with the latest equipment have proven more vulnerable to this kind of theft, while the latching mechanisms on Indego’s more antiquated stations are more resilient. The 16th and Wolf station, for example, will likely be replaced with tougher, older equipment the company already has in its inventory.

Bowman-Johnston said that despite this summer’s setbacks, Indego ridership is up 20% year-over-year, and this week it hit 1 million trips for the year so far. The network plans to expand into new neighborhoods soon.

Vandalism and theft have long plagued bike share systems, and images of bikes or scooters floating in rivers or piled in parks occasionally go viral. But while the North American Bikeshare & Scootershare Association (NABSA ) does not have data on the number of incidents, such attacks are not unique to Philadelphia and are less frequent than industry experts initially projected.

“When bike share and scooter share first started [in 2008 and 2009], the general consensus was that there would be a ton of vandalism,” said Laura Mallonee, membership and engagement director with NABSA. “But unlike other street infrastructure, we don’t necessarily see as much as we expected.”