Bike Sharing

At the beginning of this week, the newsroom at the New York Post lobbed a grenade at NYC's bike-share plans, and right on cue, the editorial staff followed up with more bike-share-bashing today.

Crain's reports that the city has narrowed down the proposals to two, maybe three, finalists to operate a bike-share system which could add about 10,000 public bikes at 600 stations to NYC's transportation mix:

Interest in New York City's bike-sharing plans seems to be running high in the industry, if today's "pre-proposal conference" is any indication. A packed room that included many of the major players in the bike-sharing industry gathered at NYC DOT headquarters to get the scoop on what New York, potentially the nation's largest bike-sharing market, is looking for.

Even as bike-sharing spreads across the United States, it remains dogged by one persistent doubt. Critics, and even some boosters, fear that the bikes will be routinely stolen and vandalized. It's time to stop worrying about crime, however. In America's new bike-sharing systems, there have been essentially no such problems.

In just the first year after introducing Vélib, Parisian bike traffic jumped 70 percent. Montreal's Bixi system saw 1 million rides in its first four months. And New York City's Department of City Planning estimates that a bike-share program would be used by as many as 554,000 residents, 33,000 commuters and 4 million tourists annually, if built out sufficiently. Bike-sharing is a big deal, and the commitment signaled by the city today could make cycling a much more accessible and mainstream form of transportation for New Yorkers.

New York City's plans to implement a public bicycle system should accelerate rapidly with the official release today of a document asking potential providers to submit bids to operate the program. The request for proposals that bidders will be responding to has been posted in the city register, giving a sense of the scale of the bike-share system the city wants and how officials see it operating. They are thinking big.

After a long and tantalizing build-up, New York City will officially declare its intent to pursue a public bike-share system tomorrow, when it releases a request for proposals to potential operators, the Times reports. At a sufficient scale, the introduction of bike-sharing here promises to open up cycling to huge numbers of New Yorkers by making it more accessible and convenient.

This is the third installment of Streetsblog Capitol Hill's series on key governor’s races. Earlier we brought you stories about a candidate who likes bikes but isn't sure about transit in Tennessee, and the choice between light rail and bus rapid transit in Maryland. Here we turn our attention to Colorado.