Bike Sharing

This is the third in a series of reports about sustainable transportation policies in Mexico City. Last week, Streetsblog participated in a tour of the city led by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Previous installments covered pedestrian improvements and the city's new bus rapid transit system.

This column on the "super-users" of Boston's Hubway bike-share system was a breath of fresh air after reading some of our local NYC coverage depicting bike-share planning as a raging conflict between car owners, pedestrians, and bike advocates.

It was another evening of hands-on bike-share station planning at Manhattan Community Board 2 last night, as New Yorkers hunched over maps of SoHo and Greenwich Village, marking the best places to site bike-share kiosks.

Residents of Hell's Kitchen and Chelsea packed into a room last night to discuss the more than 50 bike-share stations planned to open in their neighborhoods this summer. No one was there to complain -- this crowd was there to roll up their sleeves and get to work.

When bike-share launches this summer, 10,000 new public bicycles will be available at 600 stations in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The stations will typically be located about 1,000 feet apart from each other, ensuring a quick walk to a public bike from anywhere below 79th Street and in northwest Brooklyn. The exact location of the stations -- this corner or that one, on the street or on the sidewalk -- is largely up to each neighborhood to decide. The hyper-local planning begins next week at a workshop for the Chelsea and Hell's Kitchen neighborhoods [PDF] and continues throughout the service area over the next two months.

Earlier today we brought you a story about a new and potentially dangerous technological innovation – Facebook in cars. To help end the week on a higher note, here’s some far more encouraging news on the transportation tech front.

Here's one more reason to get excited about the launch of bike-share later this year: the reams of data generated by the GPS units located in every public bicycle. The Department of Transportation will use that data to inform their bike lane planning, commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan revealed last night.

It's logged more than 140,000 rides over just four months. And now Boston's brand new Hubway bike sharing system is packing it in for the cold New England winter.