Bike Sharing

New York City has selected Alta Bike Share to run its public bike-share system, under an arrangement that promises to make bicycling an integral new transit option for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. The Public Bike System Company, which supplies systems in London, Washington, Boston, and Montreal, will produce the bikes and kiosks.

The wait is over -- the city has selected an operator to run what is expected to be the nation's most robust bike-share system. This just in from NYC DOT:

New York City's bike-share plans are poised to make a big leap this week, with the city expected to select the winner of the contract to operate the system very soon, according to Transportation Nation. The announcement will come after top City Council leaders have signaled that they back bike-share.

Nice Ride MN is a hit. The Twin Cities bike share recently celebrated its one year anniversary in June.  And in July they started an expansion by adding more stations and bicycles to the network.

People riding shared public bicycles appear to be involved in fewer traffic crashes and receive fewer injuries than people riding their personal bicycles. In cities from Paris and London to Washington, D.C. and Mexico City, something about riding a shared bicycle appears to make cycling safer.

In its apparently boundless desire to see transportation innovation fail in New York City, the Times ran a remarkably shoddy and one-sided piece over the weekend on the city's developing bike-share plans. Perhaps having realized that successful bike-share systems are cropping up in too many cities to keep on referring to the same image of Parisian public bikes "hanging from tree limbs or floating in the Seine" (Washington, Denver, and Minneapolis have had almost no problems with theft and vandalism), the Times is sowing doubt in other ways.

Anyone who claims that bike-sharing is a European-style transportation innovation has clearly never set foot in Hangzhou, China. The 50,000-bike system in this southern China city of almost 7 million people (about 1.5 million people fewer than New York City) blows all other bike-shares off the map. As Bradley Schroeder of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy said, "I don't think there is anywhere you can stand in Hangzhou for more than a minute or two where you wouldn't have a Hangzhou Public Bike go past you."

DOT needs to accelerate the build-out of the city's bike network in working-class neighborhoods outside the center city, say graduate students in the Hunter College urban planning department. They argue that expanding the geographic focus of the bike program would not only improve access to safe cycling for underserved neighborhoods, it might just help overcome the current backlash as well.