Bike Sharing
How to Make Shared-Vehicle Services Accessible to People of All Incomes
Washington’s Capital Bikeshare is one of the biggest and most well-established bike-share systems in the nation. Its annual fee of just $75 buys you unlimited free half-hour trips. The system now has 2,500 bicycles at 300 stations in the District and the nearby suburbs.
December 8, 2014
Why Aren’t American Bike-Share Systems Living Up to Their Potential?
As policy director at the New York City Department of Transportation from 2007 to June, 2014, Jon Orcutt shepherded the nation's largest bike-share system through the earliest stages of planning, a wide-ranging public engagement process, and, last year, the rollout of hundreds of Citi Bike stations.
November 24, 2014
Sources: Alta Buyout a Done Deal; New York Citi Bike Fleet to Double
The buyout of Alta Bicycle Share rumored since July is finally a done deal. Alta -- which operates New York's Citi Bike, Washington, DC's Capital Bikeshare, Chicago's Divvy, and several other cities' systems -- will be purchased by REQX Ventures, an affiliate of the Related Companies and its Equinox unit.
October 27, 2014
Will Seattle’s Helmet Law Be a Drag on Its New Bike-Share System?
In what will likely be the largest bike-share expansion in the U.S. this year, Seattle's Pronto launched last week with 500 bikes.
October 24, 2014
Buenos Aires: Building a People-Friendly City
Buenos Aires is fast becoming one of the most admired cities in the world when it comes to reinventing streets and transportation.
July 30, 2014
The Citi Bike Deal Is Great News for Other Cities Too
Andrew Tangel at the Wall Street Journal had an encouraging update this week on the Citi Bike buyout plan first reported by Dana Rubinstein in Capital New York. It looks like the city is days away from announcing a deal in which REQX Ventures, an affiliate of the Related Companies and its Equinox unit, will buy out Alta Bicycle Share, the company that operates Citi Bike. The implications are big -- not just for bike-share in New York, but for several other major American cities as well.
July 25, 2014
Alta Chief: Bike-Share Expansions Unlikely in 2014
Despite continually growing ridership, Alta Bicycle Share-operated bike-share systems across America will probably not be adding bikes or docks this year. The bankruptcy of Montreal-based Public Bike Share Company, known as Bixi, which developed and manufactured the equipment that Alta's systems use, has disrupted the supply chain that numerous cities were pinning their expansion plans on.
July 17, 2014
Safety in Bike-Share: Why Do Public Bikes Reduce Risk for All Cyclists?
What if Yankees legend Yogi Berra had followed a season with 24 homers and 144 hits with one featuring 27 homers and 189 hits? Would the baseball scribes have declared “Yogi Power Shortage” because only one in seven hits was a homer instead of one in six? Duh, no. The headlines would have read, “Yogi Boosts Production Across the Board.” The fact that a greater share of base hits was singles and doubles would have been incidental to the fact that Yogi’s base hits and homers were both up.
July 8, 2014
Paris Vélib’ Launches Bike-Share for Kids
While in the U.S., bike-share systems are issuing threatening letters to parents who invent ways to tote their kids along, Paris is pioneering bike-share for the under-10 set. As far as we know, P'tit Vélib' is the first of its kind in the world.
July 1, 2014
WaPo Is Wrong: Head Injuries Are Down, Not Up, in Bike-Share Cities
A Washington Post headline proclaimed today that cyclist head injuries have increased in cities with bike-share systems, based on a study published in the American Journal of Public Health. But University of British Columbia public health professor Kay Ann Teschke is challenging that conclusion, pointing out that the data cited by the WaPo actually leads to the opposite conclusion: In cities with bike-share systems, head injuries and injuries of all kinds have gone down.
June 13, 2014