Bike Sharing

If you drive to work, the IRS allows you to pay for parking with pre-tax money. Same goes if you take the train or the bus (though transit commuters can't claim as much tax-free earnings as car commuters). People who ride their own bikes are also eligible to deduct some associated costs. But if you get to work using Citi Bike, Divvy, Nice Ride, or any of the other bike-share systems sprouting up in American cities, you get no such assistance from Uncle Sam.

The newest tool for doctors in the fight against obesity? That's right: Bike-share.

It was a dark and stormy day in San Francisco and Jeff Wood stayed dry in Woonerf studios, recording the Talking Headways podcast with co-host Tanya Snyder, who was bitter that days after the spring equinox, Washington, DC, was getting hit with another snowstorm.

Major media have a habit of blowing bike-share problems out of proportion. Witness the 2009 BBC story that cast theft and vandalism as an existential threat to Velib in Paris. Five years later, Velib is still going strong. The most recent entry in the genre is Christopher Matthews' misguided story on the Bixi bankruptcy in TIME. Headline: "Why America’s Grand Bike-Sharing Experiment Is Failing."

The Montreal-based equipment supplier for several American bike-share systems, including New York's Citi Bike and Chicago's Divvy, filed for bankruptcy protection yesterday. It's unclear exactly how the restructuring or sale of the company known as Bixi will play out, but the bankruptcy filing could accelerate the transition to more robust and reliable hardware and software. It also figures to be a messy process, though the company that operates Citi Bike expressed confidence today that it won't impede their service.

Bike-share has exploded in the last decade -- and in North America, just in the last few years. What started as a shaky concept in Amsterdam in the 1960s has matured into a viable transit option worldwide, with 600 systems offering more than 600,000 bikes.

El Paso bike-share is moving forward, despite Texas DOT's attempt to kill the whole project. That's the word today from a state representative in El Paso on the latest development in the city's proposal for a 200-bike system.

Just a few weeks ago, El Paso was all ready to go with a new bike-share network, or so it seemed. The city had lined up $400,000 in local funds from the city of El Paso, the University of Texas at El Paso and a grant from Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The regional planning agency had unanimously signed off on awarding the project $1.6 million in federal transportation funds earmarked for air pollution reduction. Suburban communities had even started expressing interest in being added to the system.

This has been an epic year for bike-share in America. According to a report from the Earth Policy Institute, the opening of Bay Area Bike Share yesterday brought the cumulative size of the bike-share fleets in U.S. cities to 18,000 bikes, more than twice what it was at the beginning of 2013.