Bike Sharing

Don't let the title of the video fool you. As filmmaker Casey Neistat says, getting around NYC can be a hassle. But when he conducted his own commuter challenge -- factoring in speed, cost, comfort, and ease of use -- Neistat found Citi Bike preferable not only to a cab ride, but to his personal bike as well.

Citi Bike is on pace to surpass 40,000 annual members sometime today, and users had made more than 212,000 trips between the Memorial Day launch and yesterday at 5 p.m. These numbers, reported daily on the Citi Bike website, have provided a continuous source of data that Google software engineer Antonio D'souza has charted to illustrate the program's growth.

At a rally this afternoon on the steps of City Hall, Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer called for the city's bike-share program to be expanded to western Queens as quickly as possible.

Over the weekend, Ted Mann and Josh Barbanel at the Wall Street Journal wrote a great piece about what it will take to expand NYC's bike-share system to the city's less affluent neighborhoods, and how the Bloomberg administration's decision to forgo public funding affected the system map. Then came a silly Ginia Bellafante piece in the Times that completely muddled the issues at play, mixing up free helmet-fittings with bike-share access and misleading readers about why stations were chosen for particular neighborhoods.

Forget the ridership numbers: you know you've hit the big time when Jon Stewart and company spend a full nine minutes satirizing you at the top of "The Daily Show."

I don't care if this is a carefully choreographed photo op. For one day, at least, we're not going to run a picture of the Weinermobile in a post about Anthony Weiner. We're just going to link back to the most recent post with a Weinermobile picture. And we're going to turn this into a caption contest.

Council members whose constituents live beyond the reach of bike-share's first 330 stations are already clamoring for the system to expand. Capital New York's Dana Rubinstein spoke with Steve Levin about expanding the system in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Melissa Mark-Viverito about stations in East Harlem and the Bronx, and Jimmy Van Bramer, who wants the program in western Queens.

Bike-share users made 10,099 trips, and annual membership continued to surge in the third full 24-hour period of usage stats that Citi Bike is reporting.