Capital Bike Share = Awesome
I just took a long stroll and didn’t feel like walking back across town to my hotel, so I rented a bike. It works like this:
Capital Bikeshare puts over 1525+ bicycles at your fingertips. You can choose any of the 160+ stations across Washington, D.C. and Arlington, VA and return it to any station near your destination. Check out a bike for your trip to work, Metro, run errands, go shopping, or visit friends and family. Join Capital Bikeshare for 24 hours, 3 days, 30 days, or a year, and have access to our fleet of bikes 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The first 30 minutes of each trip are free. Each additional 30 minutes incurs an additional fee.
It seems bike sharing systems are the new big thing. Boston has a pretty successful one.
In its first month, Boston’s European-style bicycle sharing-system pedaled past expectations, attracting riders more than twice as fast as similar programs in Denver and Minneapolis.
As of Aug. 28, the one-month mark, the program known as Hubway had attracted 2,319 annual subscribers and witnessed 36,612 station-to-station trips. At its current clip, the system is on track to surpass 100,000 rides before Halloween.
By comparison, Denver’s B-cycle took 7 ½ months, and Minneapolis’s Nice Ride took nearly six months to reach 100,000 riders. By that point, neither program had enlisted 2,000 members, despite having at least as many bikes and docking stations as Boston.
It is socialistic stuff like this that make me miss city life. The isolation of the suburbs is a little deadening.
We used Boston’s bike share. It’s great.
I use my bike (at home) for errands. My kids laugh at the big basket on the front of my bike, but, hey, it works.
i saw this program in Chicago last month.
i saw a car-share program on campus at UD earlier this year (at the UD Library parking lot).
Jason,
I hope you are having the same sort of glorious day in DC that we’re having here. What a great day to be out on a bike.
It’d be great for Newark or even Wilmington to attempt this on a smaller scale. Scratch Bikes in England seems to have a small scalable solution http://www.scratchbikes.co.uk/ it’s ran by http://www.grandscheme.co.uk/. As a former Newark resident and current DC resident and Bikeshare member I think Newark would be perfect for a small bike share scheme.
College campuses are doing this too.
Good on them. I believe Delaware tried something similar in our state parks years ago.
Philly is trying to get this Bikeshare now. Wilmington was a participant in one of the Philly carshare programs for awhile, but there just didn’t seem to be demand for it.
And I know my kids in college are able to rent a car also for a “few hours” in a program they have there, to discourage too many college campus cars, but acknowledging sometimes you just need to have a car to get errands done, go to an appointment etc.. I think it’s great. And they don’t have to be 25 or whatever, like a rental car company prefers (unless you’re military). I hope it catches on.