Bike Sharing

That acrid scent wafting from the News Corp. Building is flop sweat pouring off Col Allan and the New York Post editors as they watch tens of thousands of New Yorkers start using the city's new bike-share system.

With 6,000 bicycles, New York's bike-share program is already the largest in the country. In fact, immediately after launching, Citi Bike proceeded to eclipse the national daily ridership record (previously held by Capital Bikeshare), with 12,000 trips in 24 hours. Ridership should grow steadily as more people start using the bikes and the network expands, but how quickly will Citi Bike grow beyond the initial service area? Appearing on the Brian Lehrer Show this morning, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan discussed how the city intends to land the funds to implement the original plan for a 10,000-bike system.

Charlie McCorkell is a pioneering NYC bike advocate and the owner of one of the city's most successful bike shops, Bicycle Habitat. His flagship store is on Lafayette Street, just north of Spring, which is right in the middle of the Citi Bike service area. After observing the first day of NYC bike-share from the store, he sent a note of thanks to Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan.

Yesterday's Citi Bike announcement was maybe the last occasion to see Michael Bloomberg answer a whole string of bike-related questions from the NYC press corps in one sitting. The mayor has a reputation for jousting with reporters at these events, sometimes more crankily than others. Yesterday he was combative but clearly enjoying himself. He had solid responses for just about all the questions that came at him.

Today, New Yorkers turned out under sunny skies to try out bike-share for the first time. Citi Bike went live at 11:00 a.m., but a few New Yorkers discovered that their keys were working at some stations before the official start time this morning. By noon, it was easy to spot people pedaling bright blue bikes without being on the lookout for them.

This morning's headline stack was full of attempts by the New York Post to pour cold water on today's bike-share launch. The tabloid is so committed to its cause, it plastered it on its front cover, just below the day's most important celebrity gossip.

It wasn't yet 11:00 when I got to the mammoth bike-share station on Eighth Avenue at 31st Street, which sits along the protected bike lane in front of the Post Office across from Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, but I hadn't unpacked my camera before a Citi Bike user pedaled by. For the next hour or so, countless people stopped to check out the bikes, whether or not they actually rode away on one.

Five years ago, the New York City Department of Transportation signaled its interest in creating an extensive bike-share system "to accommodate a wide range of potential short trips." Now New Yorkers have that system at their fingertips. With today's launch of Citi Bike, there's a new travel option in the mix -- 6,000 bikes at 330 stations that will extend the reach of the transit system and expand access to the point-to-point convenience of bicycling.