Bike Sharing

Yesterday was a momentous day for sustainable transportation: New York City launched its Citi Bike system, logging a record-breaking 6,050 trips and 13,768 miles on its first day. Already the biggest bike-share system in the country, it's on track to expand to nearly twice its current size.

We’ve noted before that it can be challenging to figure out exactly how much driving is avoided when someone rides a bike. But here we have it straight from the horse’s mouth – nearly 7,000 horses, in fact. According to a November 2012 survey of Capital Bikeshare members, released today, the average subscriber drove 198 miles less per year after joining the system. Multiply that by 22,200 members and that's 3.7 million pounds of CO2 that won't get belched into the atmosphere. Nice work, CaBistas!

The growth of car-share has helped people forgo the expense of car ownership in major cities like Washington and Seattle, where it's been widely adopted. But not every city has the market to sustain car-share services from companies like Zipcar or Hertz. In his book Walkable City, Jeff Speck writes that your city might not be "ready" for car-share if, when you stick out your hand downtown, a cab doesn't stop.

B-cycle memberships are about to get a lot more portable.

Pittsburgh was the newest city to announce its bike-share plans this week, when it confirmed the city would add a 500-bike system by the spring of next year.

Chattanooga, Tennessee, was, in a lot of ways, not an ideal city for bike-sharing. It's a somewhat sprawling city, without a strong culture of cycling and walking. In addition, only a small percentage of area residents use transit to get around, so not many are leaving the car in the garage.

Earlier this week, Denver's B-Cycle bike-share system came under fire for allegedly side-stepping low-income neighborhoods. The accuser was City Council Member Paul Lopez, and his complaint was not something that system operators necessarily deny: There aren't many stations in low-income neighborhoods.

The Federal Highway Administration has come out with a handy report [PDF] for communities thinking about getting into the bike-sharing game. Based on a study of 12 planned and existing bike-sharing systems from around the U.S., the report is intended to help explain the basics of bike-share and guide cities through the choices they'll face when launching a system. While the specific advice isn't exactly groundbreaking, the mere fact that the FHWA has produced the guide indicates that bike-sharing is becoming increasingly common in America.

A recent US News and World Report article explored the economics of bike sharing -- noting that cities weren't profiting from their new systems.