Bike Sharing

In 2009, the Department of City Planning released an ambitious blueprint for bike-share in New York, and in 2011, the Department of Transportation began an extensive public process to site actual bike-share stations. Now the planning is giving way to implementation, with North America's largest year-round bike-share system set to launch in May. Today, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson marked an important milestone: New Yorkers can now sign up for annual bike-share memberships.

A big announcement is coming later this morning, but the news is all over Twitter: You can now buy a Citi Bike annual membership.

After the first Citi Bike stations were installed in Bed Stuy and Clinton Hill over the weekend, NYC DOT Policy Director Jon Orcutt told Transportation Nation that bike-share implementation will "be moving through the Brooklyn area and then into Manhattan over the next few weeks." And it looks like stations have now been installed at least as far west as Adelphi Street and as far north as Flushing Avenue.

Over the weekend, the first Citi Bike stations were installed. And before you could say, "the New York Post," NYC DOT put out a report today reviewing the extensive public planning process that informed hundreds of bike-share station siting decisions. The next time you see a story about a handful of people complaining about the placement of a bike-share station, remember all the thousands of New Yorkers who participated in this process.

Well this is an encouraging sign. Over the weekend, we received the first reports of Citi Bike station installations on NYC streets.

With Citi Bike set to launch later this spring, the long wait for bike-share in New York City is almost over. But I couldn't bring myself to wait an instant longer, so recently I headed over to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to try out some Citi Bikes.

We've known since December that Hurricane Sandy shrank the initial rollout of bike-share from 420 stations to 293, with an expansion promised by the end of 2013. We also knew that this meant the service area would, at first, not include Long Island City and parts of north Brooklyn. We just didn't know exactly where.

B-cycle memberships are about to get a lot more portable.

A reader sends in this sign of the impending arrival of New York City bike-share, currently scheduled to launch in May. This text ad is running at the top of some Gmail accounts, with a rotating tag line. Our source says the others include: