[A-List] Are US Cities Ready For Bike-Sharing?

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

By Adam Doster

In These Times (January 08 2008)

http://www.alternet.org/story/72528/


While working the graveyard shift in a University of Virginia computer
lab 13 years ago, Paul DeMaio had dreams of the open road. On a whim,
the avid cyclist and environmentalist entered "public bikes" into a
search engine and discovered images of Bycyklen, Copenhagen's then-new
bike-sharing service. One glimpse and DeMaio was hooked. "The idea just
blew me away", he says. "This was it".

DeMaio arranged to study in Denmark, where he absorbed as much about
bike-sharing culture as possible. Convinced that the idea would appeal
to Americans, he created MetroBike LLC, a bicycle planning and
bike-sharing consulting company based in Washington DC. And now, more
and more cyclists and legislators are turning their attention to
DeMaio's cause. "We've come a long way", he says. "Bike-sharing really
has gotten a lot of attention".

Essentially, bike-sharing programs provide cheap access to bicycles,
mostly for inner-city transportation. In the late 1960s, some Europeans
placed donated bikes across cities like Amsterdam and Milan for
residents to ride free of charge, hoping to provide citizens with an
ecologically friendly mode of travel. But vandalism and theft sank
nearly all of the early campaigns. Today, technology - such as
electronic payment, tracking and locking systems - has helped reduce
crime and revive bike-sharing efforts worldwide.

The Velib in Paris, a new venture owned and operated by the city but
co-financed by the JCDecaux advertising corporation in exchange for
exclusive rights to on-street advertising, has quickly become the most
comprehensive and successful bike-sharing program in the world.

Socialist Mayor Bertrand Delanoe launched the Velib in July by placing
10,000 bicycles at 750 stations throughout the city. For a small credit
card fee (29 euros a year, or about $43), Parisians can swipe the card
at any bike rack, grab an available two-wheeler, ride it across town and
leave it for others at their new destination.

Bike rental is free for the first thirty minutes, which accounts for
eighty percent of all rides, and only a marginal cost for each
additional half-hour. Officials intend to double the fleet by 2008 as
more than six million rides were recorded in the first three months,
with every bike being rented an average of ten times a day, according to
a report in BusinessWeek.

While the Velib is the largest program to date, Paris is not alone in
its cycling enthusiasm. Various cities across the globe have implemented
successful bike-sharing systems in recent years, including Barcelona,
Stockholm and Berlin. Beijing, known as the Kingdom of Bicycles,
recently unveiled plans to unleash 50,000 bikes in time for the 2008
Olympics.

Bike-sharing fever has even spread to the United States, a country
lacking a robust bike culture but one where car-sharing has thrived and
biking is becoming more mainstream. In San Francisco, the city Board of
Supervisors is set to vote on a contract with Clear Channel Outdoor Inc
that would establish a bike-sharing program in return for advertising
rights on transit shelters. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley visited Paris in
September to test the Velib in action and is considering a similar
program for the Windy City. New York City, Portland and Washington, DC
officials have also expressed interest.

Margo O'Hara, communications director for the Chicagoland Bicycle
Federation, points out that reducing dependency on the automobile - and
the carbon emissions, pollution, and traffic it creates - is the most
obvious attribute of bike-sharing, but a well-designed system has other
virtues.

"The cool thing about bicycling", she says, "is that it's public. You're
able to talk to people on your commute to work, as opposed to being in
this confined vacuum of a car". Bike-sharing also provides a cheap,
sustainable appendage to under-funded and overcrowded mass transit
systems. "Bike-sharing is not going to replace bus or rail transit",
says DeMaio, "but it's really complimentary ... because it does extend
these other modes of transit's reach".

Bike-sharing certainly isn't perfect. Safety is a concern, especially in
cities lacking bike-friendly infrastructure. Helmets are generally not
provided with a rental, and theft, while complicated by user electronic
identification, still poses a financial risk.

There's also the possibility that people who could benefit from such
services - namely, low-income people who need reliable transportation
but have problems affording it - will not be served, especially in
cities like Chicago and Washington, DC that are highly segregated, both
economically and racially. DeMaio stresses that, for the programs to be
most effective, local legislators must distribute bike-sharing resources
equitably. "It's up to the government to ensure that the stations are
placed in underserved neighborhoods", he says, "to ensure that people of
all backgrounds ... have access to this mode of transit".

But those are small concerns for an overwhelmingly popular movement. "I
think the demand is there", says O'Hara. "And you can see in Chicago:
The more acceptable it is to bike, the more people bike".

(c) 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

http://www.alternet.org/story/72528/



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