We will build it, but who will bike it?

"Philly's aiming to be the first equitable bike-share system in the country."

A much-ballyhooed bike-share system launches in Philadelphia this spring when 600 bikes parked at 60 stations make their way onto city streets.

It's an ambitious effort. The city's $3 million for purchasing the equipment has been matched by $3 million in foundation and federal funding. Stations, according to the city's bike share website, are supposed to appear "from Temple University to the Navy Yard and from the Delaware River to West Philadelphia." Bicycle Transit Systems is the company responsible for operating and maintaining stations once bike share launches, and if the experience of company CEO Alison Cohen is any indication — Cohen helped establish bike share systems in Boston, Washington, D.C., and New York City — this latest edition to the Eastern Seaboard's bike-sharing bacchanalia should be a success.

But Philly is angling for something more: launching a bike-share system that is equitably distributed geographically and placed strategically to attract riders who need bikes generally for no more than 30 minutes. Will stations be located where the most number of people can use them?

To formulate some kind of an answer, the Mayor's Office of Transportation and Utilities turned to Textizen, the SMS messaging tool developed by Code for America civic hackers in Philadelphia in 2012. Remember the Philly bike-share sidewalk decals strewn about last fall? Designed by the Mural Arts Program, the street art was placed at 95 potential bike-share locations picked by the city. Each decal asked pedestrians to weigh in via text about whether that particular spot was a good location for a station.

Texting "yes" or "no" to the number listed would prompt a series of follow-up questions: If yes, is the station close to your home or your job? Is it a station you would use at night? If no, is it because you wouldn't use bike share at all? Or do you think there's a better spot nearby by for a station? Demographic questions about age, gender, and ethnicity were mixed in. The same survey questions were presented online along with an interactive map put together by nonprofit OpenPlans. At PhillyBikeShare.com, people could answer questions after clicking on the dots representing possible stations.

"Philly's aiming to be the first equitable bike share system in the country. Part of that is making sure people are being represented," says Michelle Lee, the Philly-based CEO of Textizen.

For about six weeks starting in late September, the city collected about 10,600 comments from 5,824 people. A little more than 1,000 of those comments came via text. "We got what I think was a really strong response for the period of time," says Andrew Stober, chief of staff within MOTU.

Data culled from the online map and the SMS responses allowed for the making of an "anti-density map" indicating underrepresented areas. Lee says that for those neighborhoods with fewer responses — Newbold and Mantua were two examples she cited — community teams were dispatched to solicit feedback in person.

This is the New New Community Outreach, the sort Philadelphia chief data officer Tim Wisniewski trumpets when he says civic outreach via open data needs to be a part of how city government does its job.

The data, which the city collected and released in a 112-page report in December, offers a neat if limited snapshot of what Philadelphia's bike share-using constituency will be:

· It's majority-Millennial: 61 percent of survey respondents were between 19 and 35.
· Almost 4,700 respondents disclosed their gender. Half were male; half were female.
· And 84 percent of the answers to the question "Is this a good spot for a bike share station?" were yeses.

     Have a look at the full report, which includes all the locations being considered in phase 1 of the rollout of bike share this spring. "We're going through and finalizing those now, but they are not definite yet," Stober says. "We're working through an internal process to make them definite."