Bike Sharing

Last week the Times' Local blog (now run by former Brooklyn Paper editor Gersh Kuntzman) ran a piece about some Fort Greene residents who think bike-share stations would "interfere" with the historic district:

If you live in North Brooklyn and you're excited about the impending arrival of bike-share, you don't want to miss the Community Board 1 meeting tomorrow evening. DOT will be presenting its revised bike-share station siting plan for Williamsburg and Greenpoint, and it would be a mistake to assume that everything will work out on its own.

For your viewing pleasure this weekend, here's the animation produced by Transport for London explaining how to use Barclays Cycle Hire -- the 570-station bike-share system that launched about two years ago. There's a lot to cover in a little more than four minutes: when bike-share is useful, how to get a membership, what not to do with your bike, how to handle a bike that needs repair, and so forth.

Pretty much anywhere you go within the bike-share service area, you'll be within a few blocks of a bike-share station. There's probably a station around the corner from your office. Odds are, it'll be a boon for any of those tricky diagonal trips that aren't well-served by the subway.

Bike-share, no doubt, is going to be a major addition to the streets of New York -- in terms of both impact and visibility. Within the service area, there's going to be a station every few blocks. And some of those stations are going to have a lot of bicycle docks: 59 in many locations, and a whopping 118 next to Grand Central. Thanks to the small footprint of bikes, however, overall this new form of transit will consume relatively little space while allowing people to make tens of thousands of trips per day.

Last night's Brooklyn Community Board 2 hearing on bike-share was hardly the "battle" anticipated by the Brooklyn Eagle. About 20 people testified after DOT presented the draft station maps for the district [PDF, pages 10-15], and almost all of them supported the bike-share program in general, with several residents expressing delight at the prospect of a new travel option for Brooklyn Heights, Downtown Brooklyn, and Fort Greene. Some speakers objected to specific stations, and it will be interesting to see how DOT adjusts the station map in this area before the July launch.

There's an important meeting of the Brooklyn Community Board 2 transportation committee coming up tonight, where the DOT bike-share team will present proposed locations for Citi Bike stations.

Hungry for more bike-share maps? Yeah, us too. Thanks to Steven Romalewski, the director of the CUNY Graduate Center's Mapping Service, we've got our fix.

In an otherwise fair piece about the debut of the draft NYC bike-share map, the New York Times opted for this sensationalized lede: "After months spent shrouded in secrecy and speculation, the locations of bike-share stations in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens have arrived."