Trading Four Wheels for Two! How Bike-Share Programs Can Help Alleviate Climate Change. Leaving your car home just twice a week can cut greenhouse gas emissions by up to 1,600 pounds each year. Bike-share programs are ideal for short distance point-to-point trips—users can pick up a bicycle at any self-serve bike station and return it to any other bike station located within the systems service area. Though popular in Europe since the 1990s, bike-share programs are recently gaining traction in the U.S.. At latest count there are 78 bike-share programs in U.S. cities and universities. They vary in size from Citi Bike in New York City with 10,000 bicycles, to the Spartanburg, South Carolina, program with 14 bikes. Most programs offer daily, weekly, monthly, or annual memberships, and often the first 30 to 60 minutes of each trip are free. Many bike-share programs have high-tech checkout and tracking capabilities making information available to ensure redistribution of bicycles to the most widely used stations. New York City’s recently opened Citi Bike has been hugely successful. This past June, the first month of operation, cyclists took more than 528,000 trips pedaling 1.28 million miles. Some of the reasons Citi Bike has been so successful are that the majority of all trips in the city are less than three miles, the city now has a plethora of bike lanes, and many of the docking stations are located at subway and bus stops. BEYOND CITIES, BIKE-SHARING GOES RURAL! Bike-share programs aren’t only for cities. Quintessential mountain town Aspen, Colorado, recently launched We-cycle, the first rural bike-share program in the country, making 100 bikes available to locals, commuters, and tourists. “With over 100,000 visitors in the summer in Aspen,” We-cycle’s founder, Mirte Mallory, told Aspen Public Radio, “the bikes are an opportunity for our visitor community to experience town in a whole new way.” And commuters from towns down valley of Aspen now have a last-mile alternative to get to their place of work after getting off the valley-wide bus system.
Posted on: Sun, 13 Oct 2013 12:35:10 +0000