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.