Every month we highlight a city staff person that we work with to help make Raleigh a more bike friendly community. For February, we meet Fontaine Burress.
- Where are you from?
Originally, I’m from Cambridge, MA but also spent a lot of my childhood in Nantucket, MA and Greenfield, MA. After high school, I moved around a bit, including San Francisco, Portland, and Denver.
- What is your favorite way to get to work?
By bike of course! My husband and I take turns biking my two-year old to daycare before heading to work and I love the days that I get to take her. We recently purchased a cargo bike, so she sits in the front and absolutely loves it. Sometimes we sing songs the entire ride or she’ll bring a book and “read” to me. Other times she just sits and waves at people as we go by. It’s my favorite part of my day.
- What do you do for the City?
I am a transportation planner. For the past two years, I worked on launching the City’s bikeshare program, Citrix Cycle and worked on bringing dockless scooters to Raleigh. I’m now in the process of transitioning out of that role to take over the Capital Streetscapes program, which is focused on improving existing streets in order to respond to the changing needs of our community.
- What were a few top lessons learned from delivering Raleigh’s first bike share program?
There is not really an equivalent project anywhere in Raleigh, so there were A LOT of lessons learned. The biggest takeaway was how precious our right-of-way is; there’s not really any existing space in our downtown that’s not already serving some type of purpose. For every station that we put it, we were taking away space from something else, a parking space, a bike rack, a tree, a loading zone, a carpool lane, and pervious surface for stormwater etc., so there was a lot of coordination for each station.
I also learned a lot about our power grid. Most of the stations are connected to the grid figuring this out was probably the hardest part of the entire project. It was surprising now hard it was to bring power to something in the Right-of-Way, especially for the stations located in-street. There were a few places where we had a planned location but had to go back to square one and move it completely because there was no available power for that entire block.
- What’s the best way for the public to give feedback about Citrix Cycle?
It depends on what the feedback is. If it’s about where you’d like to see additional stations or ideas for system-wide improvements, you should contact me or someone in the City’s transportation planning division. The bikeshare implementation plan already has phase II locations selected, but we’ll likely need to make adjustments based on how much the City has changed since the plan was completed, so I try to keep a running list of where people would like to see stations. If the feedback is about a specific issue you’re having, that feedback is best directed towards the call center. They give the information directly to our operations and maintenance team, so that it can be addressed quickly. Lastly, if you enjoy using Citrix Cycle, the best way to give your feedback is by riding! The more users and rides that we have, the better case we can make to expand the system.
- Give us one fun fact!
Many people don’t know that the Operations and Maintenance team for Citrix Cycle, Corps Logistics, is made up of all Veterans. One of the guys that does the installations is a double amputee, but has a wheelchair designed specifically to install the bikeshare stations. They’re a really great group of people and work really hard to keep the system running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If you’re a Citrix Cycle user and you see them around, please say hello to them or give them a big thank you.